Welcome back to the Hybrid Real Estate
Professional Podcast. The show where we
help you build wealth through real
estate investing in just 20 minutes a
day without sacrificing what matters
most. I’m your host, Aaron Amin. My wife
and I built a portfolio of eight cash
flowing rentals across three states
while working full-time and raising a
family. A large part of our early
success in building our portfolio came
from a system I like to call the 20inut
investor. Today’s show is a quick solo
episode about a new approach to time
blocking that, in my experience, is much
more likely to actually work. At least
it did for me.
Most people treat time blocking like a
diet. It works for a week, then real
life hits. A kid wakes up early, a
client meeting runs long, or your brain
just isn’t in gear. So, today I want to
share a new way of thinking about time
blocking, and it actually is based less
on the specific task and more about the
type of task. This is a core principle
from our 20-minute investor framework,
and it’s called offense verse defense.
When my wife and I had twins in late
2023, my schedule completely evaporated
as I knew it. I went from having a calm
5 a.m. morning routine that was very
structured and regimented to maybe
getting 4 hours of sleep per night and
very little predictability. For a while,
I beat myself up because I couldn’t keep
the same schedule that had got me to
where I was at that time. But
eventually, I realized something. Time
blocking doesn’t fail because I’m lazy.
It was failing because it assumed that
my life would be predictable. So the
solution for me was not to force more
structure into a time when it clearly
wasn’t designed for that. It’s to build
a system that adapts to the season of
life that you’re in. Enter offense
versus defense. So separating tasks into
offense versus defense is a pretty
simple idea actually. Instead of trying
to block time every day for a specific
task, you divide it into two buckets.
The first is offense. These are the
things that grow your business.
Networking, deal analysis, submitting
offers, creating content, anything that
builds some type of momentum that has
the potential for growth. Defense are
the things that protect what you’ve
built. paying bills, reviewing reports,
bookkeeping, checking in with your team,
renewing insurance, anything that can
protect your downside risk. Uh, and both
of those obviously are very important.
But here’s how that applies to time
blocks. Most people build their calendar
in a way where if you’re trying time
blocking, you try and put a specific
task and you plan it out six, seven days
in advance. And what happens is as
people feel constrained by these
obligations that they’ve set for
themselves, that works for some people,
but for others, they need a little more
flexibility and fluidity to the way they
approach time blocking. So for me, what
I ended up doing was actually setting up
uh time blocks based just on those
categories, offense versus defense. And
in prioritization for the week ahead, I
would actually look at how whatever
needed to be done for the coming week, I
would lay it out and I would see what’s
the kind of spread of offense versus
defense activities. What’s interesting
about this is that obviously different
seasons of life bring different
activities. So, for example, before we
had kids, we were acquiring houses very
quickly. At that point, my my calendar
was about 80% if not 100% offense tasks.
So, I was analyzing deals. I was sending
offers. I was very aggressive about
growing our business. Hey there. Before
we finish the show, I wanted to tell you
about the new school community I
launched with my business partner,
Nathan. We took our flagship remote real
estate investing course, an entire
library of workshops and templates, and
made them available for free. We had 50
members join in the first seven days,
and we’re in there every day helping
other investors scale their portfolio
sustainably in 20 minutes per day. You
can join for free at
araranamine.com/school.
That’s school with a K s k o l. Hope to
see you there. Now, back to the show.
Now, on the flip side, when we had the
twins and uh when we had our kids in
general, we flipped into a much more
defensive posture. So, I still had some
offense in the sense that I obviously he
run a podcast. I have still continued to
network and build relationships even
though I wasn’t in an active buying
posture. But most of the actual time
blocking that I did at that point was
around defense. So we did some
restructuring of our portfolio. We
tightened up some of the systems with
our property managers. We actually ended
up selling a couple houses that we felt
were no longer serving our long-term
interest. So kind of having these little
spaces to be very intentional and
specific about these defense activities
uh proved to be very important. But the
point about the time blocking is that
instead of trying to forecast 14 days in
advance, 7 days in advance, uh it was
more block the time, protect it, lay out
what needs to be done, and every day you
know you have that protected time and
you can slide whichever task is needed
that you feel will need will move the
needle the most. Um so the other reason
this system actually works is because it
aligns with Parkinson’s law. the idea
that work expands to fill the time
available. So if you give yourself an
hour for these tasks, you’ll probably
take that entire hour. But one of our
prevailing philosophies in the coaching
that I do and in the academy that I run
is if you give yourself 20 minutes,
you’ll find a way to squeeze the value
out of that 20 minutes. And a lot of
what we’ve taught and and you this has
been proven in the way that I built my
portfolio, in the way that my business
partners built his portfolio. If you
assign yourself those constraints, the
majority of activities, especially when
it comes to rental real estate, can fit
into those blocks. So rather than time
blocking full days and trying to color
code my calendar a bunch of different
ways, which I believe can work under
certain circumstances, I try and protect
20 minutes per day. I try and label it
offense or defense. I try and create a
list of tasks and slide them in as
needed. I know I’ve repeated that a few
times, but that’s because I feel
confident that this is a much more
flexible and effective way of time
blocking for busy people. Uh I usually
typically b my week out on uh Sunday
night. So I I put those time blocks
where it looks like it’s going to make
sense based on my work schedule and then
uh I I make that task list. And I think
just doing that one simple thing that
also only takes 20 minutes. And um doing
that sets me up well for the week and it
makes me a much more effective investor.
It protects my time which then in turn
makes me a much better husband and
father which at the end of the day is
what is most important to me. So that is
a little bit behind the scenes of how I
time block. We actually have an entire
workshop called the 20-minut investor
that’s available for free at
20inutinvestor.com
and uh you can download actually not
only the workshop, it’s about 50-minute
workshop. We have an accompanying
document that breaks down this entire
philosophy and and even some more
detail. And then uh my business partner
Nathan and I actually put together a
bunch of different workflows that we’ve
used, different examples of offense
versus defense activities. We got Loom
videos that break down how we approached
it in our lives. uh so you could put
that into practice right away. So if you
enjoyed this, I’d love to hear from you.
I always appreciate getting feedback on
whether you like the topics I’m covering
or not. So shoot me a DM, drop me a
comment wherever you’re listening to
this and check out the 20-minute
investor. Appreciate your time and best
of luck. Thank you for making it to the
end of today’s episode. As you may know,
podcasts are very difficult to grow
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helping me reach more listeners just
like you. Thank you so much in advance.
