The Mindset Mentor - The Art of Doing Less and Achieving More

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Are you working harder than you need to just to feel productive? In this episode, I break down why being busy isn’t the same as making progress and show you how to focus on the few things that actually move the needle using the 80/20 rule, deep work, the Pomodoro technique, and intentional distractions. I’ll help you simplify your days, protect your focus, and get more done by doing less—but doing the right things better. 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 $100 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'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not you done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, you probably love the text message I send throughout the week. If you're in the United States or Canada, text me right now, 512-8-0-9305. Once again, 512-5-809305. Today we're going to be talking about how to achieve more but actually do less. Because if you're trying to be as productive as possible, the only thing that truly matters is how much you get done in the amount of time that you have. The problem is that most people are working hard, but they're barely getting any of the important things actually done. So in order to be truly

productive, not busy, it's not about getting everything done. It's about spending the majority of your time on the things that are going to move the needle most in your life with as much of your brain powers you possibly can in those moments when you're working. And so today I'm going to talk to you about how to do less, but actually achieve more. And I'm going to tell you, mind you, this is like, this is something I had to learn. Like this is the exact opposite of what I used to do when I was younger. So this is something that I've mentally had to work through and implement into my own life. And I'm going to show you why most people are busy but not actually productive. And I'm going to give you five things that you can start doing today to get more done in less time with more

focused than you've ever had. Okay. So let's get into it. Back in the 1800s, there was an Italian economist named Velfredo Paredo, and he noticed something that was really weird. He noticed that about 80% of the land in Italy was only owned by about 20% of the people. Decades later, this whole thing became something that's called the Pareto principle. It's also known as the 80-20 rule. What it means is this, and it can be everywhere in your life. About 80% of your results in in almost everything come from about 20% of what you do. It's not always exactly 80, 20, but this pattern shows up everywhere. Like, think about a business, for instance.

If you're a business owner, a small group of your clients usually bring in the most revenue, roughly like 80%. And on a completely different side, a small group of people caused the most headaches in your business as well. That's another 80% and 20% right. 80% of the headaches, 20% of the clients. Also, 20% of your actions in your business probably bring in 80% of the results in the sales. So the important thing here is to realize not all work is created equal.

Some of the things on your to-do list matter 10, 20, 50 times more than everything else on your to-do list. And some things that you've crossed off today or yesterday on your to-do list barely even matter at all. And so they're kind of, we're being frank, we're kind of a waste of time. So your job is not to do everything. Most people get overwhelmed because they think they need to do everything. No. Your job is to find the most important few and do those. Spend the majority of your time in those few things that actually matter most. Now, it's so simple, but why don't people actually do it?

So in 2018, there's a researcher named Meng Zhu who studied something that's called mere urgency effect. okay the study found that people will pick a task that feels urgent over the most important one even if the important one pays off way more the translation of that your brain is wired to chase what is loud not what actually matters most so email tends to be allowed text messages tend to be loud notifications tend to be loud you know people walking into your office in the middle of the day tends to be loud. But the thing that would actually change your life, it's usually pretty quiet. It's usually just kind of sitting there. It's on your to-do list. It doesn't ping you all day long, but there's a part of you in the back of your head going, I really need to get this shit done.

And that's why you can be like busy all day long. And then at the end of the day, you're exhausted and you feel like you did nothing, right? Even though you were moving and doing things all day long, you feel like you got nothing done. That's the difference between being busy versus being productive. if I can give you one big thing from today, stop being busy, be productive and actually get shit done. Busy's just doing a lot of things. Productive is doing the right things. And really, if you think about like, busy can kind of feel like progress. It feels like it, but then you don't get anything important crossed off. It feels like it is progress, but being productive is actual progress. And so to be honest with you guys all out there listening,

like I'm going to be fully transparent. I'm a recovering workaholic. Like in my business, in my early 20s, my very first business, I worked 110 hours a week for three years and I burnt myself out. And the only reason why I worked so much is because I thought that that's what was required for success. Like working hard, struggling, all that. Now, don't get me wrong. Like, hard work is required for success in anything in life. But if you're working on the right things and you're extremely focused, it should require less time. And it's definitely less time than you're spending doing some of the things that don't even really matter in the first place. So if you're doing too much, the answer is not try harder. The answer is do less. It's very counterintuitive

from what we've been taught in our society, right? Do less, but be very, very purposeful in your actions. But the majority of your time into just a couple of things. And your results, I promise you will 10x. Okay? So let me give you the step-by-step process. The first thing, number one, is you want to actually find your important few. I want you to grab a piece of paper, write down everything that you did last week. Everything.

Calls, emails, eating a sandwich, meetings, running errands, scrolling, sitting with your family, watching TV, like every single thing. Going to the football game, taking the kids of soccer practice, put everything down on a piece of paper. And then next to every single item, like, I'm like, I want you to go through each one of those things. Ask yourself, did this actually move the needle towards what I want in life? Like, did this get me closer to or further from my goal is another way of asking it? And then what I want you to do, the ones that got you closer to your goal, circle them, highlight them, underline them, whatever it might be.

Just put a star next to it. I promise you this, it's going to be a short list. It usually is. Those are your important few. And everything else goes into one of three buckets, okay? delegate it, delay it, or delete it. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show.

Delegate it, delay it, delete it. Right. And so what you do is you can delegate it, which means like, you know, if you did the dishes last week, or maybe let's say something different. Like let's say you did the laundry for the children, right? And you don't have someone that cleans a house

and you can't afford it at this point. That's fine. But can we get you to a point where you can start to afford it at growing your business. and now you can delegate that to someone who cleans the house once a week. So you can delegate things. If you're a business owner, stop doing the things that's like $10 per hour work and work on the things that are $100 or $1,000 per hour work.

The other side is delay it. Can you delay doing these things? Is it really necessary to do it in the middle of the workday? And then the other side is deleted. There's some things that you just don't even need to have on your list in the first place. And here's what's crazy about this. You probably already know which items are going to get circled and are the most poor ones before even started.

You already know. You're just not doing it. Why? Because it's probably not loud enough. And so once you know what actually truly matters most, you have to stop letting the rest of the list run your day. Okay, so that's number one. Come up with the important few. Number two, stop trying to finish your to do list. I'll be fully transparent with you. I don't know if I've ever finished a to do list in my entire life and I don't give a shit that I haven't finished the to do list. Why? Because I focus on the most important. things. Like most people, they, like, want to measure a good day by how many boxes they checked. I don't really think that matters, right? You've got 20 things on your, 23 things on your to-do list, and you get 17 of them done. And you're like, oh, my God, I got so many things done today. But what if the few that were left on that list are the ones that actually matter? Like, those were the few, right? Like, so checking off boxes feels productive. You get a little hit of dopamine, like, it feels good to cross something off. In fact, I've had people tell me multiple times. probably 20, 30 times or the past 20 years, that they will go do something that's not in their

to do list, and then they'll go back to their to do list, write it on their to do list after it's already done, and then cross it off to make themselves feel better. And so what happens is we tend to, because we want to cross things off of our to do list, we tend to choose the easy boxes so that we can get that feeling of, oh, hey, I got it done, but we're avoiding the actual boxes of the things that are actually hard and really matter. A book that absolutely changed my life because I read it at the perfect moment of my life. It's called The One Thing. It's by a guy who's a billionaire.

His name is Gary Keller. And the whole book is built around this one question. What's the one thing that I can do that makes everything else easier or unnecessary? Right? Like, what's the one thing that I can do that makes everything else easier or unnecessary? And so here's your new rule. Every morning, look at your day, look at what needs to be done, make your to-do list, and pick one thing for the day. one thing maybe two things for today but definitely not five definitely not 10 one maybe two these are the

things that if you get them done today was a win even if nothing else on the list gets done why because those are the most important things and what you do is you do them first before you get into email before you get in a text messages before you open your phone because a second that you get into your inbox or you get into your phone, you're working on somebody else's priorities. Like, think about it, would you rather get 20 small things done every single day or the biggest thing that actually moves the needle in your life? Which one do you think changes your life over the next five years? The to do list is not the goal. The goal is the goal. What's going to get you closer to the goal today? Now, picking the one thing tends to be pretty easy, but actually getting your full focus, that can be really hard for a lot of

people. So that brings us to number three. Do one thing at a time. Okay. Cal Newport has a term for this. What I'm about to teach you, it's called deep work. Focusing without distraction. That's the most important two words. Without distraction on something and using your whole complete brain power on this thing. And you have to understand this. Do not multitasking. Do not multitasking. task, your brain cannot do two things at the same time. What you're actually doing, according to psychologists and neurologist, is something that's called task switching. And there's a research to this name Sophie Leroy who studied this back in 2009 and she found something that's called attention residue. When you switch from one task to another task, part of your attention stays

on the first task. And your performance on the next task actually drops. So in plain English, what does that mean? Every time you check your email in the middle of something that's very important, and you go, let me check it real quick, make sure I didn't get this email. You didn't get all of your brain power to come back to that original thing. You leave a piece of your brain, the attention residue, on the email. Your brain doesn't task switch very well. So if you check your email five times an hour and you're working on your most important thing over the course that hour, you're only actually using a fraction of your brain to do that. Holy shit. Like think about that. Think about how many hours of your life, you've spent working at like 60% of your brain power because you're trying to do

multiple things at the same time. And remember like what I said earlier about the mere urgency effect, this is where it comes in and gets you. The loud stuff will pull you over and over again. You're like, maybe you're one thing for the day is like, get a presentation done, right? But then you're like, I got to check my email and 15 minutes in. Well, it's going to pull you out. These quote unquote loud things are going to pull you out over and over again. And every time it does, it leaves attention residue. You don't bring your entire brain back. And so deep work means this, one task, one block of time, nothing else in the entire world exists. The urgent stuff is going to scream at you. I promise you it will. Let it scream. Fight to stay focus on one task and your focus

will go stronger over time. And the absolute best tool that I know to actually structure the block of time when you're focusing on that one thing is the next technique, which is number four. use the Pomodora technique. If you've been a fan of this show for a long time, you know this is my absolute favorite productivity hack. In the late 1980s, there was a college student in Italy named Francesco Cirillo,

who was struggling to focus when he was studying. So he grabbed a kitchen timer inside of his kitchen that was shaped like a tomato. In Italian, the word tomato is Pomodoro. And he came up with a simple system. 25 minutes of focus work, five minute break. four rounds and then after four rounds you take a longer break for 15 to 30 minutes that's it 25 minutes on five minutes off let me tell you why this actually works it's been studied for the past 40ish

years right you tell your brain i'm going to focus for hours and it goes oh hell no that's not going to happen but if you tell your brain 25 minutes anybody can do 25 minutes but the rules are during those 25 minutes you work on only one thing if a random thought pops into your head oh my god I need to call the dentist, you just write it down on a piece of paper. You have a journal right next to you, and then you go back to your work, right? You don't act on it. You just write it down, you come back later. And so the 25 minutes on, you're focused on one thing and one thing only. And then those five minutes off, that break has to be a real break. Like you've got to stand up, walk around, drink some water. And then what you do, the best way to do it is to either go outside

and just stare at a tree or stare at something or close your eyes. Because what your brain will start to do is something that's called memory consolidation, where all of the stuff that you just did over the past 25 minutes, your brain's going to start to store it away. And so you want to make sure your brain's doing absolutely nothing in those five minutes. Scrolling on your phone is not a break. It's more input into your brain. And that's just going to leave more attention residue. And so start with two Pomodores a day on your one thing. That's 50 minutes. That's it. 50 minutes of truly focused work. Does that sound like a lot? It doesn't. But most people, let's be real. Most people nowadays, don't do 50 minutes of truly focused work in like an entire week. And I mean like really,

really focused. And once you get good at it, you can stretch it. You can do 50 minutes on and 10 minutes off if you want to. The tool serves you. You don't serve the tool, right? But last and not least, none of this actually works if you are distracted all day long. And so number five is you need to design your environment for focus. Most people try to use like willpower not to look at their phone and that's like putting a plate of warm cookies on your desk and trying not to eat them all day long. Good luck, not me. I'm going to eat all of those cookies if I see them, right? And so you need to stop fighting distractions and you need to start removing distractions. What I've found is that the most productive people are not the ones with the most willpower. They are the ones that designed their

entire life around not testing their willpower. And so your phone goes in a different room, not face down on the desk, a different room. Notifications, they're off. All of them, right? Close every tab that you don't need. Tell your team, your spouse, your kids, for the next hour, I'm unavailable. And if you can do it at the same time, every single day, your brain starts to learn at this time, I sit here, we focus. You can train your brain like you train a dog. And I just want you to understand this. No matter what your focus is like today, you can become more focused. Everybody can become more focused in a world where everybody's distracted by their phones, by emails, by notifications, by their boss, by people coming in,

by being on Instagram all day and day, whatever it is that they're doing, TikTok. If you can make yourself more and more focused, you're going to make yourself like a superhuman compared to everybody else. Okay. And so what I want you to write down is this. What's the one thing that if I did it every single day for the next 90 days would change everything in my life? And then tomorrow morning, before you open your phone, before you do anything else, do that one thing first. I'm just telling you this. You don't need more hours in a day and you will never get more hours of the day. You need to do fewer things and in those few things, you need to do them better. And that is how you get more done with less. So that's what I got for you for today's episode.

If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in it. Rob Dial Jr. R-B-D-I-A-L-L-J-R. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.