The Mindset Mentor - Build Your Day Backwards

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

What if you could get more done without working more hours? In this episode, I break down four powerful productivity strategies to help you reverse-engineer your days, protect your highest-energy hours, eliminate unnecessary decisions, and plan for the habits that usually derail you. If you want to stop being busy and start making real progress toward the life you want, these strategies will help you make every hour count. Freedom Live is a 3-day live experience in Austin designed to help you break through what’s keeping you from your next level. Get $50 off your ticket: https://robdial.short.gy/freedomlive The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life. Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman, Lewis Howes, Gregg Braden, Rich Roll, and Dr. Steven Gundry. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not, you've done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're looking to get to your next level and you realize that it's not found in another strategy or another book, it is only found by you conquering the version of you that is holding yourself back. Then you need to be at my live event called Freedom Live this December. We're going to find out exactly where you want to be in life, why you're not there yet. and then the unconscious patterns and fears and limiting beliefs that are capping your success without you knowing it. So if you want to live up to your full potential, but you don't know how

to break through, come to my event. Go to freedomlive, 26.com. There's currently a $50 off coupon on that website. Once again, is freedom live, 26.com. Today, I'm going to talk about how to be more productive with less hours because you'll never get more than 24 hours in a day. And the amount that you get done in those hours that you're actually awake will dictate where you end up in the future. And so if you want to create a life that you actually want from your dreams faster, then you need to understand how to be more productive so that you can actually get more at every hour that you work. The problem is that most people are trying to be productive completely wrong. And so today, I'm going to show you and teach you how to be ridiculously productive every

day and I'm going to give you four separate steps. Okay. And by the end of this, you're going to know how to stop planning your days and actually how to start reverse engineering them to have each day be successful. So let's get into it. Here's how almost everybody does whenever they are planning out their day. They build their day forward. They wake up and then they look at what they want to do today. And then they go, okay, here's my to do list. Let me put my schedule together. And then they go and they try to do it. And they push into the day and you just kind of hope that it adds up to something. Hopefully you cross off a few things from that to do list that you just made. And that's the actual problem. And I did this for years, mind you. I completely screwed this up for

years. But there's been some really interesting research done recently on this. So there's researchers on productivity that study the difference between forward planning and backward planning. So forward planning is what you would expect. It's what everybody does. They wake up. They make to-do list and then they go, this is step one, this is step two, third step, fourth step, and then they just keep going. Backward planning is you actually start with the finished outcome that you want and then you work your way backwards right into it. And what they found is that people who planned backwards, like with the end in mind, were actually more motivated to take action. They felt less pressure with time and they were more likely to actually complete the

thing they needed to complete. Let me put that into plain language for you. When you plan forward, you're kind of guessing, but you're kind of hoping today's effort will eventually turn into something, right? And that can feel more stressful because there's a lot of unknowns that are going to be happening throughout the day. But when you plan backwards, you're basically following a map that already exists. Like you set the destination and then you work backwards to come up with a step-by-step plan. Think about it like this. You can't build a bridge from just one side, right? You have to know where the bridge actually lands. Otherwise, you're just laying concrete into water, hoping that you're going to get to the other side. And so, like, the way you actually want to look at it and dive into it

is quite simple. Step number one, you want to start at the end of the day, not at the beginning. Okay? At the beginning of your day, I want you to ask yourself one question. What has to happen today for me to lie down tonight and feel like today was a success. And so you're basically starting today by looking at tonight when you're going to bed and ask yourself, what has to happen today for today to actually be a success? And notice what the question is not. The question is not, what do I have to do today? It's what does tonight have to look like?

Right? So we're starting with the end in mind. You're standing at the end of the day and you're looking back. Right. And so now here's the rule. Come up with three things maximum. Most people are like, oh, in order for today to be successful, I need these 74 things to happen. Nope, that's not going to help you at all. I would come up with one thing, maybe two, at most three things, right? Because the more things that you have, the less likely you are to accomplish any of them. And most people hate this because people want to

write down like 20 tasks. Three things, three things only. And they have to. to be three things that actually change something. Not three things that are like the easiest to check off. Three things that actually move the needle in your life. Because you can have a day where you answer 60 emails and you're doing all kinds of different stuff and you're, you've done the laundry and you're checking things off your to do list, but nothing in your life is any different. That's a day of being busy where you work really hard and at the end of the day you feel like you got nothing done. What I want is I want a day of productivity. I want to get done today, whatever needs to be done, and feel extremely productive when I lay down.

You can have a day where you get one hard thing done for 90 minutes and you feel like you accomplish a lot today because that was the number one lever that you could pull today. So the win needs to be defined right when the day starts. Okay, so that's number one. Number two, work backwards into your calendar and ask yourself, when, where and how. So now that you've got your three, what I would recommend when you write these three things down, write them on an index card and put that index card in your back pocket and carry it with you everywhere today. Right. So you have those things. Now let's create a plan. There's a researcher

named Peter Galwitzer and he studies something called implementation intentions. And what he found is that when you take an intention and you turn it into a specific if this, then that, your follow through goes up dramatically. And in a lot of his work, the follow through actually roughly doubles. And so here's what that actually means. Your brain doesn't respond to intentions. Your brain responds to instructions. So you have to walk it backwards from the finished thing to the exact moment that it starts. And so instead of saying something like, I'm going to work out today, that now becomes at 615, my gym clothes are already on because I put them on the second that I woke up. And as soon as I, six, 15 hits, I'm walking out the door. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. If this,

than that. If this, then that. And you're basically just creating instructions, right? Six 15, gym clothes are already on. Why are they already on? Because as soon as I woke up, as soon as I woke up, I put clothes on. Six 15 hits. I'm walking out the door. If this, then that multiple times. You see the difference between like, I'm going to work out today? I'm going to work out. I'm going to work out today kind of requires you to decide something like do I want to work out today and you can kind of make a decision the other one basically takes all decisions out it's just a system that requires you to move when something happens this happens that happens this happens that happens because every single decision that you have to make in the moment if you're saying do I want to work out today do I not want to

work out today whatever it might be is a chance for you to talk yourself out of it and we all are of like, oh, I wish I had more dedication. I wish I was more disciplined. It's not that we're lazy people, just to be fully transparent, most people that think that they're lazy, they leave way too many decisions that they need to make throughout the day. And your willpower goes down throughout the day, and you're going to start saying no to things that you wanted to say yes to. Right? Decisions leave opportunities to choose what is easy to do now versus like what you committed to get done. So when, where, and how. And then you get the physical movement going.

Then you're coming up with a plan and you're removing any room for negotiation. Okay. That's number two. Number three, this is super important. Okay. Almost nobody does this. Put the thing that matters the most when your brain works best. And so this is something that I call energy planning.

I do this every single day. It's the most important part of getting something accomplished every single day. because most people, they take the most important thing on their list and they schedule it for whenever their calendar happens to be empty. And that's usually like 4, 430 p.m. Right? After like seven hours of email and three Zoom meetings and like a hard conversation with an employee that you didn't want to have. So what happens is you're giving your most important thing every single day to the worst possible version of your brain most likely. That doesn't seem to really work if you think about it, right?

Like you're building your future with whatever's left of your brain after the entire day. And so you want to back it up again. But this time, not from your calendar from your energy. Once again, it's called energy planning. So you know when you're sharp throughout the day. Like you know when you feel the best throughout the day. Nobody really has to tell you. Like you probably have a pretty good idea of when you feel your best.

When you have the most energy, when your brain is working the best. For me, it's 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. I protect that three-hour gap like my life depends on it. I take my most important thing and I plan my most important task in that time. Why would I do that? Well, because I know my brain is going to be firing at its absolute best during that time. wouldn't you want to take your best brain and put your number one needle moving activity and put them together? And so for me, it's 11 to 2 p.m. For you, it might be different. For you, it might be

at night. My best friend, for some reason, he's completely opposite to me, his best time where his brain is like on it is 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. I'm already asleep by that time. But he plans his most important things when the kids are asleep and just for some reason his brain works that way. Right. For you, might be at night, it might be in the morning like 11 to 2 like mine is, it might be 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. Right? It might be right after you work out. I don't really care when it is. Whatever that window is, that window needs to belong to your number one task. Nothing else gets to touch it. Nothing. Everything else in your day needs to bend around that window, not the other way around. Like, don't protect an hour-long Zoom meeting and negotiate with your goals. That doesn't make any sense.

Like somebody asks for a 9 a.m. and that's your best time. And you normally just say yes and you move the thing that actually matters to whenever it fits. Does that make any sense? And so you have to flip it completely. You protect the goal and then you negotiate the meetings or whatever else needs to be done. Okay. And then number four, this is my favorite one. You need to kill the day in advance.

This one's kind of weird, but it works so well. Before you start your day, I want you to jump ahead to 9 p.m. And I want you to imagine that the whole thing completely fell apart. Like you just shit the bed today. You got none of it done. Not one of your three things was accomplished. Just crapping on the bed. Right? Imagine that. And now you ask yourself what happened. It's not a mystery, is it? Like, you already know. You know how you self-sabotage. You know your bad habits and your patterns. And you know what you do when you derail your productivity and your best days. You know, you picked up your phone at 6.40 in the morning, the first moment you woke up and then you immediately flood with cortisol and you've got your

brain off track. Or somebody dropped something off to you at 10 a.m. and then they stayed for 30 minutes. And that was your time that you had something really productive to be done. Or like you told yourself, get to something after lunch and then after lunch never came, right? This process of killing it before it starts, it's actually called pre-mortem. And so it was developed by a researcher named Gary Klein. It basically means this, plan out the failure of something so that you can use that failure as data points to plan around. And I did this when I hired my head of operations. We basically said, how could this opportunity of us working together completely die? Like how could we kill the business? How could all of us go wrong? And then what we did was we planned around it to

make sure that we brought her on to be as successful as we possibly could and then the business would thrive from bringing her on. So instead of failing and then studying it after it happens, you study failure before it happens, like while you can actually still do something about it and then make a plan to work around that failure so that it doesn't actually happen. And the reason why it works so well as this, you are a creature of habits. We all are. You're just a bunch of patterns that you do day in and day out. Some of them, you know, some of them you don't know. But you probably already know how you get in your own way. Like what you typically do when things get hard, how you distract yourself, your favorite way to

disconnect whenever you don't want to do something, whatever it might be. You know your patterns. So let's plan ahead so that we can avoid your typical patterns so that you can make sure that today is actually successful. And what you do is you write it on paper. 9 p.m. today, everything failed. Here's what I wanted to do. I didn't get it done. why did it happen? And you write it down. And then you pre-decide what you need to do in the moves that you need to do in order to make sure today isn't a failure and that today's the success. Mine, pretty simple a lot of times. My phone goes in a drawer in another room until my number one thing is done. I lock myself in my office. I put my headphones on and I don't allow myself

to get up. That's it. That's my entire counter move because usually what derails me is my phone, whether it be a text message or a call or business or whatever it might be, I avoid my phone at all costs. And so what you do is you just create a system to avoid your typical avoidance patterns. Okay. Now, let me tell you how most people can take this and screw this up because I don't want you to screw this up. People, especially planners, like you planers that plan and then you plan to plan to plan to plan, you plan to plan. You try to start optimizing the plan instead of actually living the plan, right? Like, you got to go get your new colored pencils and create color-coded calendars and create perfect time blocks. And you have to get some brand new productivity app.

Right. And then you spent two hours designing the day and zero hours actually doing the thing that moves the needle forward. So you have to understand. The plan is not actually the point of all of this. The plan is really just how you stop negotiating with yourself. And that's all that it really is. And so the other thing that you have to understand around this is that some days your plan is going to go to shit. Like your days are going to completely blow up. Your kid gets sick. A client calls and cancels their order. Something breaks.

Whatever might be. That is going to happen. And I want you to understand when that happens, that's not a failure in any sort of way. Because the goal was never to create a perfect day. The goal is that when you sit down at the beginning of the day to build your day, you're building up from where you want to go. go, not where you've actually been. And so what you need to do is this, the four steps that I took you through. Number one, I want you to start at the end of the day, not the beginning of the day. Number two, I want you to work backwards into your calendar. Number three, I want you to put the thing that

matters the most where you have the most energy in your day. And then number four, what I want you to do is I want you to kill your day in advance so that you can come up with a rock solid plan of how to get done what needs to be done. That is a different way of looking at your day. That is a different way of looking at being productive. And if you take these four steps and put it into your day tomorrow and every single day, you will be way more productive than you have been in your past. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on the Instagram stories, tag me in it Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And once again, if you want to come to Freedom Live, if you're the type of person who knows that you are your biggest

problem, but you are also the solution to your life and that nothing is going to change unless you change, you need to be there. I'm going to teach you how to uncover your unconscious patterns, habits, beliefs, and all of the things that are blocking you and capping your success. Then we're going to create a 12-month plan to get past it and make 2027 the best year of your life. So if you want to be there, once again, go to Freedom Live, 26.com, and I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's stay better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.