TCC Podcast #428: Get More Done in 2025 with Dave Ruel

In another throwback episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we’re taking a deeper look at goal setting and a proven process to help you get more done in 2025. Dave Ruel, the author of Done by Noon, walks through his framework for setting goals (or intentions) and making sure they happen—before noon. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

Done by Noon by Dave Ruel
4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Get Dave’s workshop in The Copywriter Underground
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  If you’re listening to this episode as it goes live, today is the final day of 2024. Many of us are looking forward to the new year and new opportunities to grow and get things done.

I’m not a big fan of resolutions. They tend to be good for a few weeks, but after 4 weeks are often forgotten. It’s even a cliche now to mention how full gyms are on February 1 compared to January 1st. The drop off shows how ineffective resolutions can be for most of us.

So what does work? Well, the past year or two I’ve focused more on behaviors rather than goals or resolutions. That is, making time to exercise every morning without a goal to lose weight or compete in a marathon or bench press a certain weight. Making time to do something every day is something I can do. This applies to other goals as well, like time spent reading rather than having a goal to read 24 books a year. By scheduling time to read every day, I can reach the 24 books read without setting a goal. 

So that begs the question, how do you make sure you spend your time on the activities and behaviors that will get you closer to the person you want to be?

A few years ago, we asked something similar of Dave Ruel, the author of Done by Noon. That book is one of my favorites when it comes to getting stuff done. My other favorite takes an almost completely opposite view of time management and getting stuff done and that’s Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks. I’ll link to both in the shownotes in case you want to check them out.

For today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I went back into the archives to resurrect this mostly forgotten interview with Dave Ruel. And while he does talk about goals, he shares a framework for making sure your schedule includes plenty of time for the behaviors you want to implement into your life. If you’re looking to get more done in 2025, some of his ideas will help.

Before I share what Dave told us, after this interview we realized that we wanted to go deeper with Dave and his system. So we recorded a workshop where he walks through everything what he shares during this interview… at an even deeper level. That workshop is one of the dozens of business focused trainings available right now in The Copywriter Underground. Coming up in January of 2025, we’ll be adding several more, including a workshop for copywriters who want to work either part time or full time with a client. My friend Jessica, who spent 2 decades as a recruiter for a creative talent agency will share why copywriters are so bad at resumes and cover letters and what they need to do differently if they want to land a so-called “real” job. And Esai Arasi will be sharing how to build relationships with prospects at scale, without burning out on social media. Both of these workshops are happening in January and are completely free for Copywriter Underground members. If you want them… along with the time management workshop from Dave Ruel, go to thecopywriterlcub.com/tcu now to join.

And like last week, you’ll hear Kira Hug asking questions on this episode as it is a throwback to 2020 when she and I were co-hosting this podcast. Okay, with that let’s jump in with Dave Ruel as he tells us how he became an entrepreneur focused on sharing better time management strategies…

————

Dave Ruel:  I’m going to go back to my days as a fitness athlete. This is pretty much when it all started. So, in the early 2000s, I was an amateur competitive bodybuilder. So, I was very obsessed with everything fitness, bodybuilding, muscle building, you name it. In 2007, I met a guy named Lee Hayward. We were fellow competitors on the regional circuit. So, we’ve known of each other within the local circuit, but I’ve never met Lee in person. I was traveling to his hometown to compete that weekend. So, Lee actually offered me to stay at his house that weekend. We only knew each other little bit, but I never knew what he was doing for a living.

The first morning, he was having coffee. He’s like, “Well, I’m going to do some work. I’m going to answer a couple emails and then I should be done by noon. And then we can go work out.” I was like, “Yeah, it’s nice to be on vacation and have that schedule.” He’s like, “Well, it’s pretty much like the way we operate here.” I was like, “Really? What is it that you do?” He’s like, “Well, I have a bodybuilding website. I make a full living out of it and making six figures a year, working from home. My wife works with me.” I was like, “Well, okay, I need to understand how you do to that.”

So, I quickly treated my passion for fitness to an obsession for business building, started studying direct response marketing, anything that had to do with online marketing. It was very limited at the time, because obviously, that’s in 2007. So, there was not that much going on when it comes to online businesses. Now, everything’s online. If you’re not online, you’re nowhere. But at the time, it was very different. So, I created my first business at that time. It was a website that I was sharing nutrition and cooking tips for bodybuilding and fat loss that was called the Muscle Group. The website is still on. We still sell digital products on that platform. From there, I emerged more on the publishing marketing agency.

So, basically, other coaches and other experts saw what I was doing online. They wanted to do the same thing. So, I was like, “Okay, well you have an audience, I know how to monetize that.” Then we launched an agency that led me to invest in a company called BiOptimizers. So, that’s natural supplements company. We did full turnaround with that company, sold it in 2016. During that time, for me, becoming an entrepreneur, it’s like anything else, going to the gym once doesn’t make you an athlete. I feel the same thing with entrepreneurship. You have to do it in order to understand what it is. In the process, I did obviously all the mistakes in the books that most entrepreneurs make when it comes to managing their time, their energy, their attention.

I build systems around my life in business in order to fix that and mostly inspiring by what I had learned in sports performance. I saw there’s too many weird similarities between both worlds. So, I started adapting that. Yeah. So, in 2016, I had the opportunity after I sold my last business to start coaching entrepreneurs. So, basically, entrepreneurs were coming to meet for the online business stuff that you’re talking about. Okay, I want to build an online business to have the freedom and yada, yada, yada, but what I realized that these entrepreneurs don’t need more tactics or strategies to gain more customers and convert more.

What they needed really was a framework to help them operate as entrepreneurs. I started sharing my systems with them. The results spoke for themselves. This is how Effic was born. We’re going to share these techniques, these systems with everybody. Yeah, now a few years later, we don’t do coaching, but we have certifications now, where we certify basically various business coaches or consultants who want to use that with their clients. We have, obviously, the Effic planner, which is our best-selling tool.

Rob Marsh:  So, we’re definitely going to get into more of that, but I want to go back to the amateur bodybuilding phase of your career as you’re just starting out. I’m guessing that there are a lot of behaviors, a lot of things that you were doing as a bodybuilder that apply to how you ran your businesses or that even run your business today. Will you tell us a little bit about what you learned in that phase of your career that you apply to your business today?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, a lot of timeless techniques that we have in… It’s not just bodybuilding. It’s really through sports performance in general. The thing that you need to have in order to become a good athlete or a good entrepreneur is discipline. The thing is that when I started training really and didn’t know that I was going to compete or anything like that, I did that just to transform myself, I realized the structure it would give me, the workouts, how to structure my workouts, how to structure my goals, having an understanding, “What do I really want? Do I want to build muscle, burn fat? What do I need to do first?” The foundational work that you set and from there, you start optimizing and optimizing with time.

The thing is that your structure needs to be solid before you actually optimize, right? I see a lot of people do that. The mistake that many gym goers do in the beginning is that they’re going to take all the supplements on the market thinking that it’s going to fast track their results and they don’t have a solid base. Their nutrition is not good. Their programs are not structured properly. They end up going to the gym all the time thinking like, “The more I’m going to lift weights, the longer I’m going to do it, the bigger I’m going to get or the more fat I’m going to lose.” It’s actually the opposite that happens. So, there’s an order to how things need to happen.

Within this structure, you need to have different habits, different routines that make that sustainable. You don’t just want to do that for X amount of time and it’s done. It’s a lifestyle. So, it’s the same thing with entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is very much of a lifestyle. If you approach it as a sport or as something that you have to do in order to perform and do it well and structure it properly, there’s a lot of similarities, right? So, we talked actually quite a bit in the book about load management and the principle of adaptation and periodization, different basics really in sports performance. But if you don’t have that really mastered on a personal level, it’s going to be very hard for you to evolve as an entrepreneur.

Kira Hug:  So, I’m wondering that when you had a moment where you felt like an entrepreneur for the first time and if that was a specific moment or if it was 10 years into your business, because I do think you’re right, it doesn’t happen overnight. A lot of us, even if we’ve been doing it for a while, we still don’t feel like an entrepreneur.

Dave Ruel:  Well, I think nowadays, people call themselves entrepreneurs before they actually accomplished anything. As I said, it’s like an athlete. You don’t call yourself an athlete the first time you play a sport or you step into a gym. You have to do the work and understand. Not everybody is going to be an athlete, just like not everybody’s going to be an entrepreneur. So, it wasn’t a conscious decision for me. Entrepreneur now is the word that everybody uses. I think there’s a lot of hype probably around the word ‘entrepreneur,’ but really, it’s defining what it really is to be an entrepreneur. For me, it was not a conscious decision. There was not a specific moment that define that.

I think it was just a matter of seeing my pattern and seeing how I was operating as a human. I see a lot of similarities between entrepreneurs, right? So, for example, academically, for me, it was a disaster. I was not good at school. Not that I was not smart enough, just because I was totally disengaged and disinterested. I realized that it was not the norm, let’s say, where I grew up. You needed to have a career and a diploma to get the job, et cetera. I realized that a lot of entrepreneurs had very non-typical type of journeys.

So, there’s not a one path, but there’s similarities with behaviors and the way we saw the world and things like that. So, yeah, it’s just realization. Even to this day, I love entrepreneurship. I love the creative side of business, which is in my opinion, probably what the difference between a business owner and an entrepreneur per se. That’s the creative piece that entrepreneurs might have, that others who might be great at business management, but don’t have that spark of craziness.

Rob Marsh:  So, Dave, as you were telling your story, you talked about developing some of these systems and routines that really help you in your business to be done by noon as your book is called. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of those, maybe even the whole theme behind Effic and how we as entrepreneurs and as freelancers can start to use a system like that or that exact system in order to start getting more of our stuff done?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah. So, we can talk about a little bit more in depth about the system. I think we’re going to have a training, Rob, soon, right? I think next month, we have something scheduled for your audience. So, we’re going to go very, very deep on the topic. To go back to Effic itself, so Effic is actually short for two words. The first one is efficiency. So, obviously, it’s achieving something using the least amount of resources. So, as entrepreneurs, we have three main internal resources or resources that we have, internal and external. So, first, our energy, obviously, and also our attention. So, pretty much how we’re going to be putting our energy and attention, how and on what we’re going to be placing our attention.

The other one, our external resource, finite resource is time. So, time is not something that we can really control. We all have 24 hours a day. Time is the same for everybody. It’s just how we operate, how we use our time and energy within that constraint of time where you’re going to be at work. It’s not about working less. It’s really about working right. We glorify working hard or working smart, but working hard is a given. For example, you go at any sport. No one is successful by going how fast on the court or on the ice, if it’s hockey or whatever. You have to work hard. It’s a given.

Then obviously, you have to work smart. You’re not just going to walk around or run around for absolutely no reason. You have to manage that energy and I would say, optimize it in a smart way. I think the key is really understanding to work right, understanding what is the desired result or outcome that you want to produce. Effic is also short for efficacy, which is the ability to produce the desired or intended result or outcome, right? So, based on that, what we try to make entrepreneurs realize, especially in the first step of the methodology, which is the projection phase, it’s understanding, “Okay, well understand where you want to go.” Be very, very clear on what you want to accomplish, right? So, we divide that in two steps.

The first one is to create what we call your big picture, okay? How do you see yourself? How do you see your life? How do you really envision that for your future? What does it look like? So, creating that big picture, it needs to be specific in some ways, but it’s like going on a trip, right? You’re going to go on a trip. You’re going to visualize in your head what you think it looks like, but in reality, it will look different when you get there, but it’s equally as good. It’s just different. So, you’re going to have that general idea of where you want to be, how you want to feel, and what you want to accomplish. From there, we’re going to ask you to look into what’s really ahead of you. So, what are the goals that you can really see become a reality?

We ask you to create goals. It’s called an annual guideline. So, it’s five goals you want to see become a reality within the next 12 months. So, now we’re not talking about projects. We’re talking about outcomes. We’re talking about results here. What do you want to become a reality? It could be you want to net $100,000 a year. It could be that you want to sell X number of copies of your book. It could be that you want to work 20 hours or less per week, right? So, it’s very, very, very clear on where you’re going or your alignment point. The key is that when we talk about alignment is that the goals that you set in the next 12 months should always be aligned with the type of lifestyle and business that you want to operate, right?

I think the problem is that a lot of entrepreneurs think that they want something. But ultimately, it’s what we call ambition appropriation. It’s that you’re going to look at other people. You’re going to look at other entrepreneurs. You’re going to let their definition of success become your definition of success. I think you have to really dive deeper than that in order to understand what you really want.

I feel like it’s a starting point for a lot of entrepreneurs, because they’re going to come to us when they’re going to feel lost, right? They’re not going to do that when things are going great and there’s no problem. They’re going to do that when, “Okay, I really need to help because there’s just too much to do. I don’t know where I am. I’m not even sure it’s what I want. I need really to recalibrate.” So that’s really the first step. We show you to do that in an efficient manner obviously.

Kira Hug:  Can you share some examples of those goals that you’ve set for yourself, just to bring it to life a little bit more, for your own life and your own business?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, like I said earlier, it could be financial goals. It could be time, because here’s the thing. I think when we go in business, we go for one thing and that thing is freedom. I divide freedom into three categories or three types of freedoms, time freedom, creative freedom, and financial freedom. I feel like always your goals will revolve around these three freedoms, depending on what season of your life you’re in. If it’s early on in your career, more than likely, you’re going to have a little bit more financial goals regarding financial freedom. When you’re going to start working and things are going good in your business, you’re going to realize that you have less time. You’re going to be focusing more into having goals for reclaiming this time, for example.

So, this is when the goal is probably going to be chop 10 hours of my workweek or work less than 20 hours a week or have six-week of vacation a year or something like that, things you want to see become a reality. I think the big thing that I see entrepreneurs do, especially when they recalibrate or realign, is that they’re going to set more creative goals. Meaning, I want this to become a reality. I want to write my new book. I want to create an online course. It’s being very specific on that outcome. Yeah, create my first online course. From there, when you know that that’s indeed the agenda or that’s an outcome that you want to have within the next 12 months, now, you can start setting your 90-day, what we call, bucket. So, your 90-day projects.

Okay, well, if I need to create my first course, probably I need to create that course. I need to create the content of that course. So, we’ll have a bucket that is dedicated to creating the content of the course. Then you were going to realize that “Well, I might need to actually produce that course,” right? So, it might be another bucket. The other one is you’re going to need to market and sell that course. So, that’s going to be another bucket, but you’re going to realize that amongst all that, you’re still going to have all the tasks to perform your business. So, it’s that juggling act of understanding… Rob, we talked about load management. … how much can you carry as far as workload and also how to divide it through the year in order to achieve that goal, right?

The main problem that I see is that people set goals as just project. So, this is the project that I’m going to do. Instead of looking at it as an outcome and understanding, “What do I need to do for this outcome, for this result to happen?” So, it’s not about creating a massive, massive project and then start working on it. It’s really understanding, “What’s the result? What can I do right now with the time, the energy, and the attention that I can dedicate to it this quarter, within the next 90 days to move in the right direction?” Understanding that sometimes it could be the main priority and you’re going to be spending a lot more time and energy and attention on that product, on that project, or something that gets you closer to this result to be achieved.

Sometimes it could be, “I’m going to have one bucket that is more in line with this result. Another one is more in line with this result.” It really depends on your context. In the best case scenario, obviously, it’s A, A, A, B, B, B sequence where okay, well, let’s focus on one and then go to the other one. But again, it depends on your business context and what needs to be done. So, yes, there’s optimum ways to do it, but there’s other ways to do it, too. The key really is understanding, “How much workload can I carry sustainably so this becomes a reality?”

Rob Marsh:  So that’s my next question then, Dave. So, let’s say that I have those goals or those outcomes. I’m pretty clear. I want to make, let’s say, six figures in the year or I want to take the summer off to spend with my kids and travel and not have to worry about work. Maybe there’s some other goals like that. So, I know that. I know that I want to accomplish that stuff, I want to do it.

But when I sit down to work on Monday, my inbox is full of stuff that I’ve got to pay attention to. And then I’ve got to record the podcast. I’ve got to get the podcast posted. And then after that, somebody needs help with some customer service stuff in our membership. We have to get the training for the membership. All of the other stuff just starts to happen. I don’t end up taking the summer off, or I don’t hit that six-figure goal. So, how do we translate from the big goals to actually getting some of this stuff done?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah. Now, we move to the next step, which is the prioritization phase. It’s understanding that out of everything that you said… For most entrepreneurs, all these tasks are on the same big pile, right? So, picture, you have a messy room and everything’s in the middle. It’s a big mount of stuff that you have. That’s usually how entrepreneurs deal with their things. They’re going to prioritize based on what they think is the priority, right? Usually, because since you’re busy, there’s a lot of things going on your business, you’re going to look where there’s fire and you’re going to try to extinguish the fire. And then next thing you know, there’s another fire somewhere else. You’re going to play firefighter all the time.

The problem is that if you prioritize that… That’s why in the book we talked about now, our matrix being glorified. We’re like, “Well, it could be a good tool. But if you want to be more proactive, if you want to have less fires, maybe it’s better to look at your task from a different perspective.” So, the Eisenhower matrix gauges the task based on the importance and urgency. The problem is that entrepreneurs don’t have that native capacity to really say, “Okay, well, this is urgent,” or “This is important.” What I’m going to see as a fire, that’s urgent and important. I’m going to have to extinguish it right now. So, the tool that we use as the impact matrix at Effic is that there’s four types of tests that you’re going to have to work on as an entrepreneur. That’s universal.

We all have these four types of tasks to attend mostly on a daily basis. It’s really how you’re going to be prioritizing these four, some of these tasks that you’re going to have in your schedule. So, number one that we have are the rock. Rob, you’re a big fan of and you’re a trained FranklinCovey professional. As we said before we started recording, the big rock, small rocks, and sand analogy was just the game changer for me when I saw Dr. Covey perform this. Dr. Covey really uses that to show what to prioritize, the important things in life. When I saw him do that, I was like, “Yes, this is definitely the way which you see prioritization,” but also, I saw the way I was actually designing my workouts, designing and operating as an athlete.

You don’t just go to the gym and start doing random dumbbell curls and bench presses and thinking, “You’re going to get that goal.” You need to understand, “Okay, well, that’s the goal. So, first of all, here’s where I want to go. Now, here’s what I want to accomplish short term. Here’s a program that’s going to get me there.” In this program, you have core exercises and then you have different sets. You have different reps and you have different moves, different tempo, et cetera, right? But you need to identify, “What are your main exercises, your foundational pieces?”, and go from there. You don’t do the opposite. This is perfect for me to illustrate, first of all, how to experiment with my workload, because it’s like going to the gym, for example.

You’re going to go to the gym the first time and going to think you can lift 220 pounds on the bench press. And then you’re going to realize that “Well, that’s actually really, really heavy. I thought in my head that I could do it, but there’s no way I’m listing that weight.” So, you’re going to start taking a little bit more weight out of it until you have something that you can manage and you can have a nice set. You do that gradually. Over time and after 90 days, your first program is completed. You’re like, “Okay, well, now I can actually move up in weights. I can add more weight to my load. I can lift more, because I can carry more load, because now I’ve adapted to this workload, right?” You get better and better and better.

A year from now, Rob is a beast benching 400 to 500 pounds in the bench press for reps, but started with barely being able to do 185. You don’t know. So, this is the thing that you have to adapt that workload over time. We use the analogy of buckets, big rocks, small rocks, and sand in order to show you how to actually break down projects into bite-sized pieces. So, understanding what are your milestones, what needs to be accomplished, and then break it down, breaking these milestones into actionable small rocks, bite-sized pieces, right? You could tell me, there’s sand in this bottle, but the problem is that entrepreneurs are great at playing in the sand, right? They’re great at managing all small stuff or taking care of small stuff before the actual real stuff is accomplished.

The sand exists. You just don’t need to overplan the sand. You have one small rock. Well, you’re going to know what the sand is. You can prepare it the day before, that sand. But you don’t have to go with the micro, micro details way in advance. This is how you get lost. This is how perfectionism kicks in and nothing gets accomplished, right? So, it’s a matter of understanding your workload from a work perspective, but also from an energetic perspective, where not all tasks are created equal based on what you’re great at and your natural tendencies and your natural capacities. So, we help you do that or establish that by yes, looking at what tasks are more impactful and what tasks take the most energy.

So, obviously, the rocks, which are always associated with innovation, with growth, they’re going to take a lot more energy for you to perform. That’s perfectly normal. So, you’re going to have to schedule them at a time that allows you to have that energy, to really push through that task. So, in the impact matrix, the second most important task that we have, the second most impactful task is routines. So, routines are tasks that are associated with the proper operational well-being of your company.

So, there’s things that you guys probably do day in and day out without even knowing but you need to do in order for your business to run properly. For example, it could be sharing on social media, interacting with your membership, students, sending emails, for example. Maybe email’s not the right example, but this task that you need to perform, whether it’s a daily, weekly or even monthly or quarterly basis that we’re going to encourage you to start putting into processes. So, listing, okay, “This needs to be done. Here’s what I need to do.”

Social media is a good example. You need to post on social media. Well, guess what? You have a process probably you’re following every day intentionally that can be documented and then made into a procedure, a series of procedures that you can then outsource or automate or even delegate to someone else, right? So, when you look at these tasks that are really associated with the growth of your company, with things that need to happen in order for your company to grow and evolve, this is what we call the power moves. These are the ones that you should prioritize.

The other types of tasks that you’re going to have are one, the reactive tasks. So, they’re the byproducts of your business operations. So, they will come. They’re things you don’t anticipate that you cannot really plan or proactively overplan, because they’re just reactive by nature and they will happen. As much as you prepare, as much as proactivity you bring into your business, there will still be some reactivity. It’s an inevitable thing. So, there’s a way to actually start looking at that and not having your day just filled with reactive tasks. You need to optimize. You need to limit personally, the number of tasks you need to do and then optimize the process, obviously.

The fourth type of task that you’re going to have are responsive tasks, which are tasks associated with communication. In this day and age, obviously, direct messaging, emails, team meetings, Zoom meetings, I mean, you name it, you’re going to have that always in your day. So, there’s a way to actually really optimize the way you operate your responsive tasks and attack them. That’s what we show you as well. So, obviously, it doesn’t happen overnight. There’s obviously constant work and optimization to be done, but the goal is for you to manage these four types of tasks in the most optimum and right way.

So, for a lot of copywriters we work with, it seems like they have the vision, they can set the goals, they understand the concept of the big rocks versus the sand, but I think a lot of us have a hard time figuring out the program and the how behind it, laying that out whether it’s for a workout at the gym or it’s for business. It’s almost hard to just break that down. What would you advise? What could help us figure out the path? I mean, we could work with the teams and coaches that you work with, but what if we’re figuring it out on our own and we can’t see how to get from point A to point B?

Dave Ruel:  So, it’s like anything else, you have to do it in order to get better at it, right? So obviously, if you use the big rocks and the small rocks and that allows you to start creating frameworks for you and depending on what type of copywriter you are. You could be a sales copy, a sales page copywriter, or an email copywriter or you do a little bit of everything. There’s always these frameworks that you’re going to have. There’s always these ordered things that you’re going to be doing, right? So, it’s understanding, for example, when you work for a client, well, I have this part, my bucket that I really need to carry for myself. So, maybe it’s a lot of outlining work, a lot of putting bullets in. And then this may be processes that you have.

So, routines that you’re going to have in order to maybe speed up the process or work on with multiple clients. So, obviously, if you’re a solopreneur and you do everything yourself, well, there’s only so much that you can do; versus if you’re like, “Okay, I have this project.” The goal is to write a sales pitch, for example, but what is your main process to write a sales pitch? It could be a routine or it could be something that is these creative elements that you fill into buckets. The second one, which is going to be more of a routine practice where you’re writing 500 words every morning or it could be having a specific process to fill in the blanks where you send some part of the copy to someone else in order to write different chapters or whatever.

So, again, I’m not a copywriter. So, I wouldn’t know exactly all the steps, but it’s understanding what the nature of the task. So, is it something that needs for me to create, that I need to create, or is it something that is more operational, that is more routine, if you want, within my creative process? Maybe parts of these routine tasks can be outsourced, delegated, outsourced or even automated sometimes now with AI. I know it’s a big trend now in copywriting to have AI assistance. So, yeah, you need to start doing it and then understanding how you operate. There’s no right or wrong. Some people operate at a heavy capacity to create. Some people are going to be more mechanical and have more processes in their lives. So, it really depends.

Rob Marsh:  So, Dave, I heard you twice say, “You need to do it.” For me, this is where the rubber hits the road. I can have the planner. I can have the goals. I can even have the task list. But there’s still something around personal discipline. You still have to show up, not open up social media, or not get lost in reading too much or whatever the things are that can distract us. Talk a little bit about personal discipline and how you learned to be more disciplined in your approach to the things that you do in your business.

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, here’s the thing with discipline or creating habits in your life, it comes down to the small things and then things compound over time. I think if you’re focused on just hacks and things that are going to give you fast results, this is probably a good approach for you or even what we do, because discipline is built over time and through repeated actions over a long period of time. There’s a concept we talked about it on sustainability in the book. You don’t want to just do things once and then it’s all fixed. To have sustainability, there are different things that you’re going to need to do consistently over time. So, it’s understanding that these rituals and these routines and these habits that you’re going to be putting into place will build that discipline.

It goes into as simple, for example, as drinking water in the morning. That’s the most simple habit that you can have that will boost your productivity and mental capacity. Most of us are always dehydrated, especially for a copywriter, where your brain and your creativity is, “There you go, there you go, guys,” but you know that. You know that hydration is ultra-important for the proper functioning of what’s in between your two ears. The problem is that it’s good thing to know it, it’s another thing to do it. Drink big, tall glass of water in the morning, that’s how I did it. Drinking the water for me was not native. It’s not something that I’m going to drink a gallon of water a day. But when you’re bodybuilding, you have to do that. You have to hydrate properly. It’s part of the plan.

So, drinking a big glass of water in the morning and filling up a jug that’s two liters of water in the morning. I’m still carrying that bottle of water when I go off and stuff like that, because that’s going to ensure that I drink my water daily. That’s going to ensure that it’s done, but I didn’t do it once and it was fixed. It was making sure that I was crossing water, check, done. All right. And then you do that. Now, I didn’t even have to check it. It’s built into my habits and my routines. But it’s the same thing with everything that you’re doing, whether it’s your exercise, your meditation if you’re into it, your gratitude, your healthy eating habits, so many things that you can build.

Actually, in the planner, we have a self-care routine that we lay out. It’s more of a self-care, I would say, checklist that you don’t even need to do it like back to back to back routine. It could be something you do daily, and it compounds over time. So, hydration, making sure… You don’t check your clean eating checkbox for three days in a row. Well, hopefully, your entrepreneurial competitive spirit is going to kick in. So, I need to get better with that and understanding that too, understanding how you react to it. So, every week, for example, we have a review process where we ask you to understand what went well in your week and what didn’t go that well.

We have something called this self-awareness scorecard and something very, very simple to do, but it’s going to allow you to introspect and say, “Okay, well, my energy level was two out of five this week. Why did that happen?” Then you’re going to look back and say, “Well, my eating was not that great four days out of the past seven days. I know, I didn’t drink enough water two days a week. Well, maybe I’m going to fix that. What can I do right now what’s in my power that I can just improve next week?” So, you’re going to look at these things.

Over time, these habits, these rituals are going to become second nature. This is how you build discipline over time, right? Next thing you know, it’s not even hard, it’s super easy to do. So, it’s the principle of adaptation. It’s the same thing as, for example, increasing your ability to carry weight or to carry some load. It’s the same thing with habits. You just have to do it over time and it compounds. It’s like saving money.

Kira Hug:  Well, I did not pass my clean eating test today, because I are French fries. It happened.

Dave Ruel:  So, it’s another thing though, Kira. As you said, it happens. You’re not going to be perfect 100% of the time, just to be aware of it. In the book, I talked about more than often, it takes at least two cycles. So, two quarterly cycles in order to start actually having the awareness of, “Where do you stand regarding load management? Where do you stand regarding your habits, et cetera?” Embodying all of that, it does not happen overnight. Guess what? Nobody’s perfect. You’re going to screw up, especially at the beginning. That’s fine.

That’s another part of it is that you don’t want to be… If you keep all the fun out of your life and everything is regimented and so rigid, that’s why people actually don’t adhere to a lot of productivity methodologies. The things are very, very, very strict. One of my friends always say, “Most productivity methodologies are created by single male in their 40s.” It’s so regimented that it doesn’t allow for any flexibility. So, we made sure we built that into what we do.

Rob Marsh:  French fries for everyone.

Kira Hug:  I enjoyed those fries, so I don’t regret it.

Dave Ruel:  That’s something you should put on a T-shirt. I’ll buy it. French fries for everyone.

Kira Hug:  Okay. Because you shared the habit of drinking water, I’m just curious what some of your other habits are, your personal habits, maybe your morning routine too. I know this is in the weeds, but we’re pretty nosy and we like to know what you do.

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, my morning routines change all the time. I’m a dad of two young girls, two years old and seven years old. The thing is that it changes, because yeah, they wake up at different times. Now, it’s more stable, obviously. Seven years later, it’s getting a little more stable. I traded very strict routines. I was more of a routine person when I was in bodybuilding and I had no kids. It was just me and my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. It was a lot easier to obviously have the flexibility or that back to back sequence. But now, there’s things that I need to do through the day, that I need to do. At the end of the day, it needs to be done. So, there’s five elements, and I covered a little bit about it. Again, I can tell you what they are.

So, first of all, you need to cover hydration. So, one thing I do every single morning when I wake up is hydration, rehydrate, tall glass of water, then fill up my big jug of water. That’s the one thing that I do all the time. Now, from there, I like to as much as possible wake up before the kids. So, I have that little window of time where the house is actually quiet. I can have some introspection and me time. So, there’s two things that I do. So, first of all is gratitude. When you haven’t practice gratitude and I was like that before, it’s a lie, yeah, whatever, gratitude. But truth is gratitude is the greatest remedy or the greatest medicine for anxiety.

At one point, when I was running my second and my third business simultaneously, I started developing anxiety, because I was so, so busy. Here’s a weird thing. I started developing anxiety when I was hearing the Skype message, because obviously, I was facing a workload that I had never faced before. That was a whole period of that adaptation. I knew at the time, my business partner and I had the systems in place in order to face that. So, we were building that as the business was growing. But I remember that every single time we had a meeting, for example. We had just way too many meetings. That’s why we actually build frameworks to have better, more efficient meetings.

I was getting sweaty palms. My heart was racing, because I was future pacing that there will be fires, there will be more things added to my plate. The weird thing is that the trigger was the Skype ring. It was absurd. So, I’m blessed that my wife, Karine, is a psychotherapist. So, I started talking to her about that. She’s like, “Listen, gratitude.” Gratitude is one of the core things that she does out of her practice. She actually has a gratitude journal that she sells in the French speaking market. That’s a best-seller. She’s like, “You know what? You have to list the things that you’re grateful for, list the things that you have that are right there that you have right now that you are grateful for.”

I started doing that. It was not immediate, but it was very fast that I started changing or rewiring the way I was seeing things. Why are you stressed about that? You’re stressed about future events that never even happened, right? So, it teaches you to focus on the present. It teaches you to focus on what you have right now. Because when we’re busy or we’re anxious, we’re going to tend to see things a little bit more negatively. By focusing on the things that you have, hey, I have my two hands, stupid example, easy example, but guess what? Still a miracle. Two hands, 10 fingers, I mean, think about it, but we take that for granted.

Another weird example and I tie it into water is that I can just turn a knob and there’s clean drinking water coming out of the faucet. We take that for granted. Think about how magical that is and how many people in the world don’t have that. It’s not about what they have, what we don’t have. Still, in my opinion, it’s finding magic into random things that you take for granted. When you do that over time, same thing, it compounds and you tend to have a different perspective on life. For me, that really cured my anxiety. That really helped me in the long run. So, I ensure that every day I do that. In the planner, we actually have what we call the reconnection phrase. There’s different tools that’s found in the journal, that you can listen to different gratitudes, things like that.

You can do it in your own journal if you want. But I’m more of an efficient guy. What I do now is just that reconnection phrase. Today, I’m grateful for, fill in the blanks. I keep in mind that. I added the second part too is that I’m a big believer in the frequency of alignment, checkpoints of your alignment, making sure you’re still in the right direction, where you want to be. Reminding yourself on the things that are important whether it’s like outcomes, but also values. When you stay true to your values and align with what you want to accomplish, you can rarely go wrong. So, it’s the habit of doing that daily, the little practice that will make you more disciplined all the time. So, that’s the second thing.

There’s daily exercises. So, obviously, you don’t have to go to the gym and do bench press and deadlift, PRs every day. The key is just to sweat every day. Dedicate 15 minutes to it. If you don’t feel you have time or you don’t have to go, let’s say, to gym or whatever, just sweat every day, right? So, if you have talked to me 10 years ago, I would go to the gym five times a week, but guess what now? Ten years later, I’m a dad. I have different interests.

Now, I’m going to practice different sports. I’m going to go take walks. I’m going to go be active and do something. Just to model sweat every day, for me, that works, right? So, it’s doing that. Once you do it, boom, check, the box is checked. It doesn’t need to be part of the morning routine process as long it’s done that day. So, that’s the third.

Fourth one is meditation. What I mean by meditation is really some you time with your own thoughts, with your environment. Take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to do that. Focus on your breathing. Little things that first of all will compound for stress management. Also, slow down the pace sometimes when needed. So, I do that. I try to do it in the morning when I can.

If I don’t have time, let’s say all the kids wake up early or whatever, I’m going to keep a moment during the day to do that. I’m going to sit down, inside or outside when it’s nice. I have a nice leather couch in my office where I just sit down and do that. So, focus on my breathing and let things calm and bounce. I’m not a 15-minute meditation yogi who’s going to go in deep trance every day. That’s not what it’s all about. It’s just reconnecting with yourself.

The last one is the no French fries policy. It’s not true. It’s not true, because I love French fries, but it’s just keeping a clean diet. It’s just like basics. Keep it 90% clean, and you’re going to be fine. That’s the basic rule. So, yeah, but there’s some days where we’re going to order the poutine from the dairy bar.

Rob Marsh:  Clean eating’s over once you have poutine on your plate, that’s for sure. So, Dave, before we run out of time, I want to talk a minute about your book and maybe your planner. When I’m thinking about books about time management and productivity and goal setting, there are a ton of them already out there. We talked about Stephen Covey’s books. Hyrum Smith wrote several about them, the goal setting books by James Clear and BJ Fogg. There’s so many. Dan Kennedy has a great one on time management as well. So, what made you sit down and think, “Hey, what the world needs is another book about how to get stuff done”? What’s a little bit different about your approach?