TCC Podcast #237: How to Get More Done with Dave Ruel

Dave Ruel joins us for the 237th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Dave is a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author of the book, “Done by Noon.” There’s an ongoing need to get more done in less time, and Dave paves the way to do just that. Whether it’s working fewer hours, finding a work-life balance, or you just need more direction when it comes to productivity, this episode is a must-listen. Here’s what we talked about: •  The plus side to bodybuilding and fitness and how it can be applied to business. •  How to manage discipline as a business owner, so you can achieve more in less time. •  The Effic method. What is it and how can you apply this to your life? •  Working hard leads to more success right? Not quite. It’s about working the right way. •  The better way to plan out goals and reach them. •  Why you need buckets in your business. •  How to look at your tasks from a different perspective and minimize urgency. •  The 4 types of tasks you need to implement into your life and business. •  What energy management can do for you. •  Narrowing down the most important things when everything seems top of the to do list. •  Creating the fine line between urgent and important. •  How small things compound over time to make the greatest success. •  5 elements to better habits and a better morning routine. •  The quickest, easiest way to get more done. •  Why you need to measure discipline over time and cut yourself some slack along the way. Habits, discipline, and energy management are key components to a successful business. Hit the play button or check out the transcript to absorb it all.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:   Done By Noon by Dave Ruel Dave’s Website Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Think Tank   Full Transcript: Kira:  How often do you get to the end of your day and think, "I was busy, but did I really get anything done?" Do you ever look back over the last month or even the last quarter and wonder why you don't have time for the big things you want to do in your business or your life? Maybe the problem isn't our calendar or our to-do list. Maybe the problem has to do with our approach to managing our time and our energy levels. Today's guest for the 237th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Dave Ruel. Dave is a former bodybuilder who realized that his approach to exercise might be a good way to approach all the projects he wanted to get done each week. Rob:  Before we get to the interview with Dave, this podcast episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Think Tank. That's our private mastermind that we've been telling you about for the last couple of weeks. It's for copywriters and other marketers who want to challenge each other. They want to create new revenue streams in their business, create new products in their business, receive one-on-two coaching from Kira and myself, and ultimately grow your business to whatever your goal is. Rob:  We often say six figures or more. But if that's not your goal, we designed it to help you reach the goal that you have for your business. If you've been looking for a dynamic mastermind to help you grow as a copywriter and as a business owner, visit copywriterthinktank.com and set up a short information session with us to find out more. Kira:  Now, let's jump into our conversation with Dave. Dave:  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:  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:  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:  So,