Most people think I’ve truly lost it when I tell them that planning fun FIRST is the key to getting their work done. Crazy? Irresponsible? Today I’m sharing why this idea is *neither*. Legendary speaker Zig Ziglar said that we get more done the day before going on holiday than any other time. Why? Because we have an appealing incentive! Tune in to learn how planning your fun first can help you become your most inspired, productive self in your business.

See transcript below:

Steve Napolitan: Welcome to More Business More Life Daily. And today I want to talk about planning your fun first, so that you can live more well, getting more work done.

So, what I want you to do is start focusing on what you want to do. The reason for this is, if we set a timer… There’s Zig Ziglar, a famous speaker, right? Maybe you know of him, he’s passed away. He was really famous in the 70s and 80s, and I remember hearing him speak, and he said, “What if I gave you two tickets to Acapulco? But the catch was, you had to leave at eight in the morning tomorrow, would you be ready to go?” And then he started taking questions from the audience and people would say, “Oh yeah, I would. I’d have to make a list of everything I need to do. I got to get someone to watch my dog. I’ve got to get someone to watch the kids. I’ve got these things to do. But then I could go on this holiday.” And the reality is what he poised the question, and what was unanimous across the audience, was that when we’re ready to go on a holiday when we’re ready to go on vacation, we typically will get more done right before that than any other day in our life.

And it’s like, why is that? Well, because we have a hard deadline. You have to. And so when we put that pressure upon ourselves, things happen. There’s a story about Apollo 13, the space capsule that almost didn’t make it back and did end up making it back. And there’s movies on it, there’s a movie with Tom Hanks. And in that movie, they showed the one point where they found the way to get the capsule back to earth from space. However, there wasn’t going to be enough oxygen left in the capsule for them to be breathing. So they would get the capsule back, but they would have dead astronauts. So they took all the parts that they did not need to get the capsule back to earth. And they dumped it on the table with these engineers and they said, “Hey, I can’t remember what it was, but you have 31 hours before they run out of air, go for it.” And they figured a way to make a filter, so that they didn’t die from a carbon dioxide. And that was putting the pressure on the time.

And so, what I’ve found in my life is, if I give myself a deadline, if I say I have to leave work at 4:00 PM, or I have to leave at five, or if you want to leave at two o’clock, then you have to put the pressure on yourself to adjust. So that’s why I say plan your fun first. Because if you try… I have many clients in the past that tried to just take time off, but if you’re going to leave at five and you’re just doing it because you want to, and then there’s nothing to do after five o’clock, then you have no reason to leave. Right? Then you’re like, “Oh, if I stay another 30 minutes, another hour. Oh, I was two hours late. Oh, oops. No big deal.”

But it is a big deal, because you’re missing out on your life. You’re missing out on your family. If you don’t have a family, you’re missing out on going out. You can’t create a family, if you don’t find that partner, and you can’t find that partner, if you’re working all the time. So you have to plan the fun. You have to plan what you want to do, whether you want to take dance classes, music lessons, whether you want to play with your kids. What if you want to have a date with your daughter, or a date with your wife, or take your son out to have a time together? It’s in that time that we get to know our loved ones and we also recharge our batteries, which is what I said on the previous episode, is we need to recharge so that we can come back full force.

So what I want to encourage you to do, I’m going to give you more tactics, but right now, I want you to start thinking, what are the things you want to put in your calendar for your family? I want to say, you should do that first. You should plan dates with your wife, or your partner… for me wife… your husband, your partner, whoever it is, the person that you love that you want to spend more time with, any person that you want to spend more time with. Maybe it’s your mom. I don’t know. Whoever it is, whatever it is. Maybe it’s just, you want to go take more classes and learn things. Or maybe you want to learn a foreign language. Put that on your calendar, now. Why wait? And then when that class shows up, you have to be done with work, because you have to go to that class. So it forces us.

Now, I can tell you, what I’ll do on the next episode, is start talking about how do you plan your day? Because now you’re going to say, “Well, what if I can’t get all my stuff done?” There’s many tactics around that. I’m going to give at least one or two on the next episode, so please comment here. Let me know what was valuable about this. Let me know when you plan your fun first. Put that in here. If you’ve liked this, then please subscribe to our channel. We’ll be sending these videos out daily, at least five days a week, and look forward to continue to serve you.

As always, remember, choose gratitude and create freedom.