How To Get Sh*t Done Without Being Busy

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, Shaan, you tweeted something that has made me incredibly envious of you. You said, the joy of living in unscheduled life. And it kind of pissed me off because I want that. And I know that you got a lot of messages. One of our friends emailed you and said something like, dude, how on earth do you have this unscheduled life?
And so I actually have the same question. I want to spend this episode actually asking you all about it. Tell me everything about this unscheduled life. I need to know how you can get so much done by having nothing on your calendar.

**Shaan Puri** (0:36)
Let's do a definition. So what do I mean when I say the unscheduled life? The unscheduled life, all it means is this.
Today or right now even, next hour, you are going to do the most important or interesting thing to you right now, not what you thought might be the most important thing two weeks ago when somebody put something on your calendar, because that's how I used to live, right? I used to wake up and look at what's on my calendar. And it's like, wait, wait, wait, why is the calendar in charge? And where did this even come from? Oh, this is a meeting I agreed to two weeks ago, or this is a recurring one-on-one with this person, but it's not necessarily the thing that I actually think I should be investing my time and my energy into. It's not where my brain is. It's not what I have inspiration on. It's not the most important thing. So what I did was I just went to my calendar and I just clicked delete, delete, delete, delete. I just deleted everything. And I just said, well, I'm gonna live an unscheduled life. Meaning, if you wanna call me, like the text message I tweeted out yesterday, somebody was like, dude, this is awesome. We were having a good text chat. And he's like, this is awesome. I would love to jam on this sometime, maybe next week.
And I just said, I'm free, call me right now.
Because I'm in the moment. We're inspired by this right now. We're both agreeing that this is really interesting and we should explore if there's something here.
Well, why would we wait a week and let that, inspiration is perishable. It's like an avocado, it turns brown.

**Sam Parr** (1:54)
All right, so here's the deal. Things are changing fast in the tech world and the internet marketing world. And that's a big deal because you have to know which trends to stay on top of in order to market better, in order to acquire customers for cheap. And so you can run your business as efficiently as possible.
Staying on top of all those trends is a pain in the butt though. And so the folks at HubSpot have made this amazing report. It has a very official sounding name because it is a very official document. It's the 2024 State of Marketing Report. They've looked at millions, tens of millions of bits of data to find the top marketing trends that have the most immediate impact on your business. And so what HubSpot did was they surveyed over 1,400 marketing pros from across the world, and they looked at what are people using effectively, what's not working more importantly, and they've been able to compile it in a really easy to read document. So if you wanna learn ways how to optimize for social or how to boost engagement or how to strike the right balance between privacy by still being personal with your customers, go to hubspot.com/state of marketing to get the free copy or just Google HubSpot state of marketing and it will come up. Check it out.
What were you doing when they started texting you?

**Shaan Puri** (2:59)
I was at that moment, I was, well, I was texting them, but in general, I didn't have like a thing I had to do. I have what I call blocks of time. So if you've ever read the Paul Graham post, maker versus manager schedule, it's a kind of must read for anybody who wants to build shit, anybody who's a creator of any kind, whether you're a content creator, you're an engineer, you're a product creator, you're a writer, whatever you do.
Maker versus manager schedule is very important. I'm able to live the unscheduled life because I'm not a manager anymore. I am not operational anymore.
But that didn't happen by accident. I made it so that I wouldn't be that way. And basically, if you look at a manager schedule versus a maker schedule, a manager schedule is what you described. It's a zebra calendar. Every 30 minutes, there's something, that thing is usually put on there by your assistant or by an employee or a partner or somebody else, a sales call that gets booked on your calendar. And you just hop from thing to thing to thing, and you're constantly switching and you're constantly doing.