(2025-02-21) Procopio How To Be Unbeatable At Your Job According To A Crack Commando Unit

Joe Procopio: How To Be Unbeatable At Your Job, According to a Crack Commando Unit. Productivity isn’t about effort, it’s about planning.

“Give me a minute, I’m good. Give me an hour, I’m great. Give me six months, I’m unbeatable.” — Col. John “Hannibal” Smith.
There. That’s the quote. Yeah. It’s from The A-Team. That’s my secret formula for peak productivity.

It’s also basically the mission statement on my career.

You want to know why people hire me? Ultimately? It’s the Hannibal Quote. Because it’s the very roadmap for achieving peak productivity, and ultimately business outcome success.

And it speaks to something a lot of people miss. Productivity, where your job is concerned, isn’t about effort or efficiency or removing distractions. It’s about working on the right things at the right time. (focus)

Turning Priority Into Productivity

whether you’re a new, young, low-level employee or a leader focused on the biggest of pictures, the temptation to engage in tasks that look like progress in the name of productivity is inescapable.

I almost want to say: If it feels like work, it’s wrong. If it feels like fun, it’s right. (play ethic)

if you don’t want to be replaced — by AI or otherwise — the productivity that’s going to save your bacon is not going to be a series of disconnected minutes that lead to disjointed outcomes. Those minutes look like progress, but they’re just aggregated minutes of busywork.

The Hannibal Quote is also why I won’t be a formal advisor without at least a six month contract. Anything less is help that looks like help, but it’s really not help. I need six months to make your company unbeatable.

Actually, I’ve gotten it down to six weeks but that’s with 25 years of experience at my back. You want to be unbeatable and be the MVP of the game? Give me the full six months.

Here’s my secret formula to get your plan to come together.

Give me a minute, I’m good.

These are the small tasks that are little movements forward, but most of them are not tasks that should fall into your purview

So how do you figure out which minutes are the good minutes and which are the death spiral minutes?
You take an hour. Right now

A lot of us take an hour, maybe two or four, close our doors if we have them, turn off our phones, and bang out a task that takes our full attention and creativity.

Stop it. Stop carving out these hours like they’re collections of 60 death-spiral minutes.

Here’s another dirty secret. During the day, sometimes several times during the day, I’ll take anywhere from 20–30 minutes to lie down on my couch and stare at the ceiling and figure out exactly what the **** I’m supposed to be doing. Then I get up and get extremely busy again. (Most Important Task)

Give me six months, I’m unbeatable

I’m not the best at anything I do. I’m not great at a lot of things.

But here’s the deal. You drop me anywhere for six weeks, and I’ll dominate it.

the days of siloed expertise are quickly coming to an end. CEOs and upper-management are literally measuring how much an employee’s output is contributing to the top and bottom lines

they’re not wrong, mathematically. They’re just measuring productivity without priority.

We never get to innovate, and then the hammer falls when the business outcomes suck and then the job cuts happen.

Here’s How The Plan Comes Together

Those death spiral minutes? You need to hire those out.

Those hours of forced creativity? They don’t work, not in any sense that isn’t just the completion of large chunks of death-spiral minutes. Instead, take the hour when you need the hour to think about the purpose and definition of what you’re doing. Because priority.

Then spend those quick-hit minutes pushing real progress, whether it’s a couple minutes to fire off an email that’s going to lead to big things, or the 15 to 20 minutes you snuck to push that code solution a little further.

finally, whatever your six month goal is, re-evaluate every minute task you do. Do this every so often, and live without what isn’t top priority to achieve that goal, until it hurts.