--- title: 'I Tried Alex Hormozi''s $100 Million Productivity System' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=iTQTlRcDsLw' video_id: 'iTQTlRcDsLw' date: 2026-07-14 duration_sec: 0 --- # I Tried Alex Hormozi's $100 Million Productivity System > Source: [I Tried Alex Hormozi's $100 Million Productivity System](https://youtube.com/watch?v=iTQTlRcDsLw) ## Summary The video explores Alex Hormozi's productivity system, which separates tasks into 'manager' and 'maker' categories and advocates for time-blocking to maximize deep work. The creator attempts to implement the system, shares practical steps, and discusses real-life challenges and results. ### Key Points - **Goal and System Overview** [00:00] — The creator aims to make $100 million by adopting Alex Hormozi's productivity system. The system distinguishes between manager tasks (quick, switchable) and maker tasks (require uninterrupted flow). - **Manager vs. Maker Tasks** [01:30] — Manager tasks include meetings, emails, and admin work; maker tasks require deep focus. Interruptions during maker time can cost up to an hour of lost productivity. - **Time Blocking Maker Time First** [03:00] — Block maker time on the calendar first (like marbles in a jar), then fill in manager tasks around them. Aim for 4-hour blocks, as shorter blocks are less effective. - **Ruthless Protection of Maker Time** [05:00] — Be kind but firm in protecting maker time. Example: the creator cut short a conversation with his wife to preserve his maker block. - **Automating Manager Tasks with TidyCal** [06:30] — Use scheduling tools like TidyCal to automate booking, collect payments, and avoid back-and-forth emails. TidyCal offers a lifetime license for $29. - **Flexibility and Adjustments** [09:00] — Life happens (e.g., a broken tree branch). When disruptions occur, move maker blocks to another time and fill the gap with manager tasks. - **Results and Conclusion** [10:30] — The system helped the creator finally complete long-standing projects. He hasn't made $100 million yet but sees the system's value. ### Conclusion The maker-manager productivity system, when implemented with ruthless time blocking and automation, can unlock significant progress on long-delayed projects, even if the ultimate goal of $100 million remains distant. ## Transcript I recently came across this video on YouTube and I thought to myself I would love to make $100 million so I thought I better try Alex from Mo's productivity system that made him $100 million and see if that works for me let's see what happened now I am not one to bury the lead so I'm going to tell you right now I have not yet made $100 million but I can see why this works today what I want to do is I want to walk you through very simply what this system looks like and how you can implement it yourself second I want to talk about realistically how this works because it never goes according to plan which you're going to see in just a few minutes and of course I want to talk a little bit about results what this is doing for me and I and how I'm going to use this going forward now to kick this off I want to mention the sponsor of this video this video is being brought to you by appsumo specifically tidy Cal tidy Cal is a scheduling software that is very similar to calendly and other tools that are being used but it's gosh it's so simple to use it does everything you need it to do and it does it at a fraction of the price of basically any other offering especially considering that you can buy just a lifetime license of it for right now $29 then you never have to pay again which is almost unheard of in software these days anyway I'll show you how that ties into this later because that is definitely one of the tools that we're going to be using to help simplify our lives so to kick this off here's essentially what this productivity system looks like there are two types of tasks and essentially two two types of time that we should spend on these tasks there is manager tasks these are tasks that you regularly switch between these are tasks where it's like boom boom boom get them done meeting after meeting after meeting or bookkeeping and email and followup and that kind of stuff all these little things where you can just jump right in get it done and move on then there are maker tasks and of course maker time maker tasks are those tasks where you're most productive when you can have undisrupted time where you can just get into a state of flow and then productivity just skyrockets and the problem that Alex points out is when people that are doing these two different types of tasks have to interact and you got people who are working on manage your time who are trying to get all these things done and they need to interact with you and you're trying to do a maker task and what happens is that somebody says hey you got five minutes but it disrupts a very long period of your time let's say you're in the middle of a 4-Hour time block and all of a sudden boom train of thought is gone it's going to take me a half an hour to get back into that flow state that 5 minutes just cost me an hour Alex suggests that sometimes it could cost you a full 4H hour block of maker time and if I'm honest that has definitely happened to me many times and if you're watching this video there's a good chance that you are both a manager and a maker in fact most of us find ourselves playing both of those roles at some point whether we're talking about a job you're in a job right now there are tasks you need to do that just need focus and disruption is just going to totally mess with that and then there are meetings you need to have have coordination and other just administrative tasks that you just have to do as part of your day the system helps you be more productive with both of those things so that you get way more done now as a business owner which again many of you watching this are a business owner if you're a content creator and you don't do that as a job for someone else it's to try to make you money yourself you're the business owner you are definitely doing both manager and maker tasks and having too much Interruption from these manager tasks could be preventing you from accomplishing nearly enough to be able to see the levels of succcess that you want to see these are the things that separate people like Alex rosi from most of us who just don't get enough done and it's because Alex admits he is ruthless with his time I find that I have a little bit harder time being ruthless with my time which is one of the things that is holding me back and I think I'm going to try to be a little bit more ruthless but hopefully in a kind way all right so here's the process here's what we do with this whole concept step one we need to time block our maker time specifically we're going to put that on the calendar first in a video years ago I showed this analogy I was taught this as a kid the analogy is this if you take a jar and you fill it halfway full of sand and then you try to put in a full Jar's amount of marbles after the fact of course what's going to happen about half the marbles are going to spill out all over the dang floor but if you put the marbles in first fill the full Jar full of marbles and then a half a Jar's worth of sand you pour it in afterwards it'll fill in the space around the marbles and it all fits you can fit more stuff in the jar if you put the big stuff in first well manager tasks many of them happen to be things that we can fit in between stuff they're things that just don't take a whole lot of mental energy to shift between one and another they're just things that need to get done you just do it let me show you my calendar this is my calendar for this week and you see these big blocks of time these are for the most part maker time now because this is happening literally this week these are things where I've specifically planned out what I'm going to work on during that time but if I show you next week you'll see that I have some spots where I'm just like quiet time quiet time and other spots where I put manager time which we'll talk about in just a minute this quiet time doesn't mean I'm taking a nap what it means is it's time where I am to not be interrupted so that I can focus on a specific project and sometime between now and then I will make the decision about what priority I need to focus on during that 4H hour block of time now in this book 10x is easier than 2x I've mentioned this on this channel because this was awesome by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy Dr Benjamin Hardy Dan talks about how he blocks his day in 4our time blocks shorter time blocks than that he tends he says don't tend to be very effective now Dan in a big part of what he does is he spends very little of his time in manager time because that's not his Forte so he spends almost all of his time in maker time it seems doing the things that he is really good at and then he brings on the right people people to do all the the other stuff for him now a lot of us aren't in a position where we can hire a whole bunch of people to do all those tasks for us and we need to be able to switch back and forth so the best thing to do isn't to rapidly switch between maker tasks and manager tasks but to dedicate as long a block of time as you can for maker tasks now what does that look like if you're working a full-time job and you're just trying to create content on the side we've talked to that audience to you many times over the years and we've said just dedicate an hour or two a day that needs to be an hour or two of maker time need to be uninterrupted time manage your tasks for your little business that you're working on and the side trying to hustle and make it happen those tasks you're probably going to need to kind of figure out a way to accomplish throughout the day in your morning here and there where you have time and those are the kind of tests that you can easily fit into those places but you absolutely need is at least a few maker sessions throughout the week and that might look like one to two hours a few nights a week and maybe a 4-Hour time block over the weekend but a lot of us just can't get that done because of family obligations and just other things happening in life what will make you successful is if you get disciplined enough to dedicate yourself to make your time even if it's minimal like that just put it on your calendar and then find a way to be ruthless about it you can do it in a kind way but also be ruthless about it uh just the other day my wife was here at the office she stopped by to visit let me know some things that happened after an appointment and I was like okay but I don't have a lot of time and I need to go make a a YouTube video and so I'm sitting there feeling a little bit of anxiety because I'm like I'm watching ing this maker time evaporate but I'm like this is my wife like this is important I need to talk to her but after a little bit the I I saw this conversation starting to shift toward not important stuff just kind of hanging out at that point and at that point I just said hey sorry but I really need to go make this video right now if I don't do it now I'll run out of time and she was completely understanding she's like oh yeah of course how often do we not say what we need to say because we don't want to hurt people's feelings if you're a people pleaser like me that's probably basically all the time be ruthless kindly but be ruthless with your maker time so that you can get the stuff done that needs to get done and communicate that and help the people in your life understand who you like what your needs are so that you're able to get this maker stuff done all right the next step is we need to then fill in the manager tasks I've already kind of alluded to this manager tasks again are things like your email your meetings your phone calls and all that I would even include if I'm doing an interview to create content right someone's going to interview me for a YouTube video or for a podcast those are things I don't have to get in a flow state for if we set up a call we're going to set up the call we're going to start having a conversation and boom you're going to ask me questions I'm going to answer them that's easy it's not the same thing as getting into creative state to make my own video so I need to put those kinds of things in my manager time now the easiest way to do this is to automate as much as you can so when somebody reaches out to me and says hey I'd love to interview you and I look at their stuff and I'm like yeah this would be great let's do an interview we don't do this whole back and forth well what what's your availability I used to do that it was crazy I'd look at my calendar and it'd be like well okay Thursday's wide open it's not really cuz I need creative time but it wasn't blocked out because I didn't have specific meetings and next thing I know I have in the middle of my Thursday an interview that disrupts half the day because losing the flow and and also it's like oh I've only got 45 minutes till that interview well not enough time to film this video so I guess I won't film it yet and then that 45 minutes is less productive cuz then I'm like looking around for t to try to get done no so what I do now is I send them a link this is where tidy Cal comes in with tidy Cal I can send people a link to like a specific let's say I they need 30 minutes cool I give them the link copy this link here and then and then this is what they see they get a look here at my calendar and they're like all right well in the next couple of weeks um looks like Tuesday and Wednesday he's unavailable um but I can get him this Friday for 30 minutes and the cool thing is is this is just tied into my calendar so as long as I'm maintaining my calendar here on Outlook then I update it here and people that want to meet with me it's going to be up to date they're not going to be able to schedule an appointment with me at a time that doesn't work for me I use this all the time for interviews and stuff but also most of you who are content creators one of the things you probably should be selling in some way is some sort of coaching or Consulting and if you're going to do anything live man just use tidy Cal the cool thing is is for this version there's a free version just like there is of calendly and everything else but with this very inexpensive full professional lifetime license that I have I'm also able to collect payments with my my bookings so I can set up a booking like this one that's a 60-minute meeting and I can say Well it costs $60 or I set up another one that's a coaching session and I put a link to this on my website where literally someone clicks that they want to schedule a coaching session with me it can take them here to tidy Cal they can see okay I want to coaching session with Ricky well if I want it next week it's got to be Thursday let's see what his availability is okay yeah Tuesdays and Thursdays and they pick a time that works for me based on my schedule and then once they pick that time then I collect the information that I need from them which I can custom and it collects payment right here and I don't need a separate payment processor there are also a ton of other awesome features within tidy Cal you can do date polls if you've seen these before where essentially like I want to do let's say I want to do a cookout with my team we do that a few times a year or some kind of party right and we're trying to pick the day the time that works for everybody we've done all sorts of these kind of polls for lots of things on the team including like hey we want to host an event when would be the best week for everybody and what we do put a title here uh create a you know URL for it so this could be uh barbecue and then I put a description here and then I say here's how long it's going to be it's two hours long and I put in what dates that I want to include in this and then I create the date poll which then looks like this and people can pick from the dates that I put into and the times that I put into there and pick the ones that are going to work for them and in the end we' take the one with the most votes this is all built into tidy Cal I can also set my availability globally so it's like well I'm 8:30 to 4:30 like anything outside that window even even if my calendar says I'm open I might be sleeping or doing stuff with family I can set it so that it's consistent from week to week I can also set specific unavailable dates like Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and Christmas these are dates where I'm sorry not going to take a meeting with you for a long time I've been using a lot of other tools to do all this stuff they're just too expensive I ended up having to turn them off and I've just been making do and then I found out about tidy Cal and was convinced right away so if you want to boost up your productivity and automate all of your scheduling your booking that kind of stuff just use tidy Cal it's kind of a no-brainer so to recap the system it's really three steps first we do need to separate all the tasks that we do into is this a manager task or a maker task is it something I can easily task switch between just get it done or is it something where for me to be really productive I need longer periods of uninterrupted time then what we need to do is we need to block time on our calendar in as large of time blocks we can up to at least four hours if you can do full maker days even better but just recognize that a maker day might be more than one maker task you might switch from one project to another later in the day totally fine Alex is Hardcore and says there have been times where you do three time four hour time blocks in a day that's a 12-h hour workday which a lot of us entrepreneurs end up doing on a fairly regular basis but I would probably have to do a lot less if I did a better job of this time blocking and then step three is we're going to fill in all of the manager tasks either between maker time blocks or even during manager time block so you can literally take a half a day and just be like boom these are manager tasks but then the next question is what do we do when life gets in the way literally the first day that I went to try to implement this system for myself I had blocked out the whole morning you know what happened there was a storm the night before and a giant Branch from my tree busted and was still hanging on but not by very much and I was like well I have a child that plays in my backyard all day long I really don't want this thing falling on his head so I got on a ladder and I got out the chainsaw and I took care of it and I lost an hour first thing first day of trying to do this there are going to be things that are going to come up there are going to be times when a really important meeting that you've been trying to book with somebody who is even harder to schedule time with than you just come up it's like I have an opportunity finally to meet with this person but it's in the middle of one of my maker blocks what do I do fine move that maker block somewhere else even if it's to another week rearrange those kinds of things now now this time block this is a manager time block so what do we need to do we need to fill in the rest of the time for this time block with other manager tasks in fact it could be that you have a manager time block scheduled for tomorrow move those tasks to today and now you have a new opening for your maker time block that you were going to do today you have to leave some room for flexibility because not everything is under your control if I'm only ever available for podcast interviews on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the person that's doing the interviews is only ever available on Wednesday days and Fridays we will never sync up we have to be willing to have some flexibility but most of us probably don't have that problem most of us probably need to work harder on having a little more rigidity be ruthless about your time to the extent that you possibly can and when you need to adjust adjust in a way that doesn't ruin the whole system and I am confident that you're going to be able to tenx your business whether or not you ever get to $100 million like Alex did so finally for me what do the results look like the results are that there are projects that have literally been on my to-do list for months that all of a sudden I have time for things that I've been putting off because it's like oh I've been meaning to work on that today I've been meaning to work on that today and I sit down to work on it and then something comes up and I don't get very far even if I work on it for an hour but so many of those projects I've looked at and I've thought I could probably do that whole thing in four hours if I could just dedicate four hours to it they're finally happening so as much as I haven't made $100 million yet from this productivity system thanks Alex thanks for sharing it with me I've known about time blocking I've known about manager time sort of but the way he explained it I thought was really beneficial so I would also encourage you to go check out that video because there are a lot of tidbits and stuff it's just it's just on the long side but there are a lot of really good pieces of information that you're going to get from hearing Alex explain this that I probably didn't construe in my long but not nearly as long video so definitely go check out that video and we'll see you here in our next video on income School