1000-minute rule — time management technique that helped Ryan Serhant grow his net worth to $40 million.

In this article I will explain the time management technique recently featured in a Harvard Business School (HBS) case study by Professor Ashley Whillans “Ryan Serhant: Time Management for Repeatable Success.”. By reading it, you will learn what the 1000-minute rule is, how to use it on a daily and yearly basis to achieve your business or personal goals, and who Ryan Serhant is.

A man contemplating his future-self versions. Artistic expression to conteplate the 1000-minute rule. Made by the author using MidJourney.

Who is Ryan Serhant?

Born on the 2nd of July 1984 in Houston (Texas), Ryan Serhant is an American real estate broker, author, and television personality with an estimated net worth of $40 million. To many he is most known for being the founder and CEO of his brokerage, SERHANT which gets a lot of reach through his YouTube channel and some 1.4 million subscriber base (as of May 2024). In Ryan’s own words on his LinedIn page, SERHANT is “The first real estate company launched and designed for the marketplace of tomorrow, at the intersection of brokerage, education, media and technology.”

In a nutshell, Ryan’s rise to wealth and fame followed a clear trajectory.

Having graduated in 2006 from Hamilton College in English Literature (Theatre), his acting career didn’t go quite as planned and in September 2008 Ryan had to become an associate broker to meet his life’s end. His life took a real turn after joining the Million Dollar Listing New York as a star of the show that debuted in 2012 and was nominated for an Emmy in 2014 and 2015 for outstanding unstructured reality program.

After 8 years of successful brokerage career, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic Ryan started his own brokerage company called SERHANT in September 2020. In the 4 years’ time since Ryan achieved quite an impressive feat of scaling his firm to over 500 people across 19 states and amassing over 6 million followers across all social platforms.

Aside from his brokerage, Ryan is also the author of 3 books: 1) Sell It Like Serhant, published in 2018, 2) Big Money Energy, published in 2021, 3) Brand It Like Serhant, published in 2024. The final endeavor worth mentioning is Ryan’s “the Sell It Like Serhant digital course and education platform to teach others how to master the art of sales to succeed in any profession”.

What is the 1000-minute rule and how to use it?

How to think about time?

There is a fundamental difference between how employees and entrepreneurs think about their time.

When you’re an employee you work for someone else and your boss dictates what you do with your time. When you work for yourself, on the other hand, you work not for your boss but for time.

“Time is not only your greatest asset, but it is also your currency.”

The harsh truth is that time is not something you own. It is something that you constantly trade. You have the ability to buy it back in certain ways. You can also invest your time into something, and when used appropriately time is something that gives you a positive return.

Rayn looks at every day as a new ‘bank of time’ and then diversifies by having drivers, multiple assistants, chefs to cook his meals etc. All of those cost him money but as long as the return on investment (ROI) for him buying back his time is greater than that cost, then it’s a good investment.

1. How to look at your day (an entrepreneur’s day)?

The Global Life Expectancy as of 2024 based on United Nations data is 73.3 years. Given that a year is 365.2422 days (accounting for leap years), the average human would live 26,772.25326 days.

26,772 days is too big of a number to manage by anyone. Therefore, we need to look at each day’s worth of time.

1 DAY = 1,440 MINUTES

Each day equals to 1,440 minutes (24 hours).

However, even some of the most productive and efficient individuals would spend at minimum 380 minutes (6 hours 20 minutes) sleeping, and 60 minutes (1 hour) eating every day. That leaves us with only 1,000* minutes each day to spend on what matters and use them to achieve our goals.

These 1,000 minutes a day is like your bank account, where minutes are equivalent to currency/monetary value. The saying of ‘time is money’ is as old as the concept of money. When you start equating time to money, you automatically shift your mindset and will focus on not wanting to waste it. Just as you wouldn’t throw out 300 dollars, you also wouldn’t want to throw out 300 minutes of your time.

To illustrate an example, Ryan put this principle in practice at his firm by calculating how much each meeting cost for every participant’s time based on their salaries. If a meeting of 10 people costs the equivalent of $11,000, the expected ROI of whatever the outcome of that meeting is must equate $11,000 minimum. Otherwise, he wouldn’t want to have the meeting, We can see a similar approach to deprioritizing meetings from many other entrepreneurs. For example, Elon Musk’ 6 productivity rules for staff include three quoted below which echo Ryan’s sentiment.

1. No big meetings: “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get [out] of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.”

2. And no frequent meetings too :“Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.”

3. Leave a meeting if you’re not contributing: “Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”

This change in mindset will help you realise that every single minute of the day counts, and should, in principle, have a positive ROI to create a positive ‘cash/progress flow’.

“Intentional allocation of every 60 second window you have will create a better you.”

2. How to look at your year (an entrepreneur’s year)?

4,000-hour rule.

In order to build or scale something meaningful you cannot live by the year. You have to live by the hour instead — the same way each day is operated by the minute. Looking at a single year as an entire year is pretty limiting but if you look at a year as 4,000 hours then you can more easily break it down and connect it with your goals.

The paradox of becoming your own boss is that it feels like you finally have all the control, whilst in reality you don’t actually have that much control.

“What you can have control of is how you use your time and no one else can tell you how to do that when you work for yourself which is amazing.”

Once you change your mindset to work in the 4,000 hours instead of a year than next you need to connect those hours to your goals. At the beginning of a year allocate a certain amount of hours to each goal based on an educated guess.

Ryan, for example, has three main businesses: brokage, sales training program and production. For each of them he sets a certain goal and allocates a certain number of hours. Brokerage — getting to a certain amount of new markets and a certain amount of gross revenue and sales; sales training program — getting it to a certain level of new members and building out a certain part of the tech product; production — making sure to produce a certain amount of content and generate a certain amount of new followers and subscribers.

3. The truth about making money as entrepreneurs: How to manage all of that time to reach your goal (an entrepreneur’s goal)?

Looking at the year as hours and mapping them to specific goals is only part of any entrepreneur’s success. The second aspect is using leverage to best achieve success for those goals.

The current education system directs people to developing skills and trading their time using those skills for money. Entrepreneurship works quite differently though.

“Entrepreneurs don’t make money from having skills, they make money from solving problems”

Hence, your time as entrepreneur is not associated best with creating a new skill set but rather it’s associated best with determining solutions to solve problems that the world has. You should be spending your time identifying problems and gaps in your market and then buying back your time by hiring/building a team of people with specialized skillset to help you solve those problems.

That in essence is the ultimate truth of what being an entrepreneur means = solving problems by leveraging other people’s skillsets.

Living and breathing by the 1000-minute rule — exemplified by Ryan’s life

Now let’s look at how specifically this 1000-minute rule applies to Ryan’s life, which is all about maximizing the time in his day to its highest and best use.

His typical day looks like this:

• 04:00 AM — Ryan wakes up
• 05:00 AM to 06:40 AM — he works out at the gym. He makes his early morning workouts very difficult to make the rest of his day feel easier.
• 07:00–07:30 AM — he does calls or emails he has to do as a priority
• 07:45 AM — Ryan is in the car on the way to his office or first appointment of the day.
• Then most of the time, he’s in appointment (phone, Zoom or live) on the 15 minute mark all day long for the next 12 hours. Ryan believes in doing the hardest professional tasks at the very beginning of the day. Throughout the day Ryan touch-base with all of his various department heads to make sure the pillars of his company are moving forward. He also spends time working on his course business and production company. Although each day might bring its own challenges, Ryan’s main focus — no matter what — is on the brand. In his own words from one of his vlogs: “the brand comes first. Your brand is your reputation and if you want to have a good reputation and therefore a really good brand as a company you need to focus on awareness, relevance, and meaning.”
• 10:00 pm — Ryan gets home to see his wife, he cleans his mail box and prepares for tomorrow. As such his days always start the night before. He then takes a shower, goes to bed and blacks out to start the day again at 4:00 am.
• There is a personal life caveat to this routine of course. One night a week is a date night, weekends are to spend time with the family, holidays are always scheduled and planned in advance.

This might seem quite extreme for most people but for Ryan he’s just spending his time in a way that allows him to reach his own goals and get the best ROI on his time.

“When you make time your partner, you’re working together to be productive and successful.”

When it comes to task-management, Ryan developed his own triage system to categorise his work-related tasks based on urgency and importance:

1. Category one — spend your minutes here: This category is for tasks that you uniquely provide value to. You should be spending most of your precious time each day on this category of tasks and leave a lot of other tasks to other people. For Ryan as the CEO, it means taking top client calls as these directly drive his profits.
2. Category two — spend zero minutes here: This category is for tasks that you’re adding no unique value e.g. bookkeeping. These tasks should be delegated to others. Doing them yourself might get you a faulty sense of accomplishment because ultimately it is not actually moving the needle on anything important.
3. Category three — spend your bonus minutes later: This category is for tasks that use ‘bonus minutes’ which are minutes gained throughout the day when e.g. a scheduled meeting ends 10 minutes early. For Ryan this could be calling his clients that like their new apartment. You should use these minutes to get more things done. This way you will not waste your spare moments in the day.

How to start living a more productive life — time audit and life goal setting

Think about what you can learn from the 1,000-minute rule and Ryan’s mentality. You can start by conducting your own time-audit. For 1 week, take note down everything you’re doing from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. At the end of the week, colour-code every single activity and assess whether you spend an optimal amount of time in areas you care about. Those areas could be as simple as business, personal, and family. Once you’re done with the audit, set goals for how much time you want to spend on each category and then think of decisions you can make to enable that change, so that you live your days and years to come more in alignment with these goals.

Key takeaways

1. Start thinking about leveraging your time as an investment into your future success.
2. Focus on identifying and solving problems by leveraging other people’s skillsets and time.
3. Use the 4,000-hour rule to set objectives for the year.
4. Use the 1,000-minute rule to manage your day.
5. Start by doing a time-audit of how you spend your time over the course of a week. Then set objectives of how ideally you’d like to spend your time and make decisions to enable you do so.

References:

HBS Working Knowledge. (2023). Ryan Serhant: How to Manage Your Time for Happiness. [online] Available at: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/cold-call-ryan-serhant-how-to-manage-your-time-for-happiness [Accessed 3 May 2024].

serhant.com. (n.d.). About Ryan Serhant | SERHANT. [online] Available at: https://serhant.com/agents/ryan-serhant?leaseProperty=false.

The Independent. (2021). ‘Walk out of a meeting’: Elon Musk’s six rules for staff resurfaces. [online] Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-staff-six-rules-b1838960.html.

Macrotrends.net. (2024). World Life Expectancy 1950–2024. [online] Available at: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/world/life-expectancy.

Serhant, R. (2021). Daily Routine of a CEO — How I Structure my Day (Update). YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHXgEqb7aCA.

Note from the author

* — Whilst the most efficient people may have 1,000 minutes to spend every day, the reality is that you don’t. Most people sleep more than 6 hours 20 minutes and spend more time than 1 hour eating their meals. No matter your circumstances though, the principles of the 1,000 minutes rule still apply to you.

How to reference this article:

Lukowicz, Marcin. (2024). 1000-minute rule — time management technique that helped Ryan Serhant grow his net worth to $40 million. [online] Available at: https://medium.com/@marcin.lukowicz/1000-minute-rule-time-management-technique-that-helped-ryan-serhant-grow-his-net-worth-to-40-5d2eadbb7e64.