How to Get an Hour’s Worth of Stuff Done in 30 Minutes – Blaine Oelkers

What if every day could be as productive as the day before vacation? If you want to always get stuff done as you so easily do before your annual leave, then you’re going to want to hear what our guest has to say.

Meet Blaine Oelkers. Blaine is the President & Chief Results Officer (CRO) at Selfluence. He’s always loved to help people get results. He started out helping mastermind groups of business owners get the results they wanted very quickly and practically, so they started referring to him as Chief Results Officer. Fast forward a few years, Blaine is now America’s ONLY Chief Results Officer helping people get stuff done through his unique concepts such as The 30 Minute Hour™, The 21-Second Habits™, and WYTAYBA™.

Blaine is all about working smarter, not harder. He knows exactly which habits bring success, how to create them instantly, and stick with them for a lifetime.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the PDF (Plan, Delegate, Focus) business hack, why you need to put your business in the backseat every now and then, the concept of ‘what you think about you bring about,’ and why you shouldn’t fight for your limitations.

If you want to get better results in your business without overwhelming yourself, tune into this episode to learn what Blaine has to say.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Blaine Oelkers

💡 What he does: He’s the President & Chief Results Officer (CRO) at Selfluence.

💡 Noteworthy: He is America’s ONLY Chief Results Officer®. His TEDx Talk has over 190,000 views.

💡 Key Quote: “On the day before vacation, you kind of release your inner perfectionist, and if you’ll do that a little bit more. Done is better than perfect. Getting an 80% done is better than having not even started if you let somebody else do it; maybe you got to clean up that 20% at the end, but it’s well worth it. But release that inner perfectionist, and you can have a lot of 30-minute hours yourself.”

💡 Where to find Blaine: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Plan, Delegate, Focus. The most productive day of the year is not around New Year or Christmas. It’s actually the day before vacation. It’s no secret that everyone gets the most stuff done on the day before their annual leave. It’s when all procrastination goes out the window, and you become the ultimate master planner. But what if you could turn every day into day-before-vacation?

Blaine shares his productivity hack called PDF – Plan, Delegate, Focus. He explains, “I want you to think of the 30-minute day before vacation mode PDF, and that stands for Plan, Delegate, Focus. Now what happens is the day before vacation, all of a sudden, you become the master planner, and that day because you have to get a lot done, is very planned out. So I call it NDP, next-day planning. So if you will add that in, I guarantee you that your time will be better spent, that you’ll create some 30 man hours just by planning the day better.”

Put your business in the backseat every now and then. Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. And putting your business in the backseat every now and then is one of the best things you could do for yourself and your team. If your business becomes too codependent on you, you’re doing a disservice to your company. You actually want to build a business that can run without you.

Blaine explains, “Instead of waiting for the catastrophe, put your business in the backseat. I put my business in the backseat by going into airplane mode on my phone. And I remember one day I put my phone in airplane mode, and I usually do it for like an hour, and I forgot, and I just got so much done. […] Everything survived, and people got better because they had to think for themselves, so we’re doing a disservice to our team members if we’re always answering the questions for them but just realize take it in chunks, build it up, start small, but put the business in the back seat every now and then. It’s good for you.”

What you think about, you bring about. It’s a tale as old as times; you are what you believe. But when it comes to your business, positive thinking won’t do the trick. Not only do you have to control what you think, but you also need to take action on it. Blaine explains this concept in detail,

“For me, throughout my life, that became a theme. And so in the end, I ended up starting to teach about this concept ‘What you think about you bring about,’ how do you control what you think about but then also what you think about you bring about so it’s not like the law of attraction just thinking and it magically appears it’s more about, think about it, program a part of your brain in the back of your head called the reticular activating system is like the filter to send you the right stuff, but then you have to take action on that.”

Don’t fight for your limitations. It’s one thing to fight for your beliefs and values. But it’s a whole other story to fight for your limitations. So, the next time you find yourself arguing at work, try to understand where you are coming from.

Are those beliefs actually your limitations? Blaine says, “When you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. Now you can’t unhear that quote. And so what’s going to happen is, you’ll first start to notice your own limitations. I’m too this. I do that. my business is this. my business is that. oh, the economy this. the economy that. And you’re going to start arguing, making the case to keep those limitations, and I call that the pre-defeated mind because you will not even try to better your business or better yourself. If you just find yourself arguing for your limitations.”

Top Quotes

“I started helping mastermind groups actually of business owners, a collection of attorneys, a collection of dentists, a collection of different business owners, and they started calling me the chief results officer because I was helping them kind of get results very practically very quickly and kind of consistently on a weekly basis. So someone called me that, and I go, wow, that’s a good name. And so you know, I Googled it. I checked with the Patent and Trade Office, nobody had it. So I registered the service patent, and I got my little official sheet from the US Patent Office, and now I am the one and only chief results officer in America willing and able and ready to serve you in any way that I can.”

“The opposite of overwhelming distraction is getting clarity and then kind of getting results but making progress on the right things. And that when you flip the switch, and you start doing that, guess what you win the battle, the brain chemicals, and your body rewards you with dopamine and serotonin, and you’re happier, and you get more stuff done, and you have the energy. And the opposite of that is when you drift into overwhelm. Then you go down this kind of slippery path of brain chemicals, and you start to get depressed and low energy, and you get less than, and then you feel worse, and it’s kind of a downward spiral.”

“I use this thing called proactive procrastination in order to make room for more important stuff. And sometimes the important stuff is just me, like making sure I get my peloton ride in or something, right? But you know, that’s so so that’s that for me that but the other side that the negative side of procrastination is when you’re you’re putting off that big important thing.”

“As I go through life and I interview business owners in the last months of their life, they typically don’t say I wish I built the business bigger. They typically say I wish I had more memorable moments with the people that I love.”

“When you think of the 30-minute hour, I want you to think of this day, and it’s the day before vacation. Now think about this the day before vacation, people typically get three to 10 times more done than the average day.”

Links

Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself by Mike Michalowicz

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Blaine’s TEDx Talk

Selfuence