Do you struggle to stay productive and focused in today's fast-paced world? Take a page from Dmitry Belianin's playbook. This high-powered investor and content creator has mastered the art of ruthless productivity, squeezing 10-12 hours of work into each day - even while travelling. The secret? Dmitry starts his mornings with intentional rituals to energise his mind and body, then ruthlessly protects his time, blocking distractions and limiting meetings to just 45 minutes. He's also a master delegator, empowering his team to handle routine tasks so he can focus on high-impact strategic initiatives. By implementing Dmitry's strategies, you too can become a productivity powerhouse, scaling your impact across multiple ventures. Stop wasting time on calls and meetings that don't move the needle - discover Dmitry's proven system for maximising your time and achieving your biggest goals.
0:00 Dmitry Belianin's Daily Routine and Productivity Strategies
7:18 Managing Workload and Delegation
10:25 Systems and Scaling Content Creation
13:38 Saying No to Non-Essential Tasks
18:05 Balancing Demands and Maintaining Focus using Systems and Delegation
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Welcome to “15 Minute Mastery,” the ultimate show for iGaming professionals, hosted by industry veteran Dmitry Belianin. With over 17 years of experience, Dmitry brings unparalleled insights and wisdom from top industry experts in just 15 minutes. Each episode delivers actionable strategies from all iGaming verticals to improve your personal and business performance. As the founder of Belianin, Dmitry also shares his expertise in nurturing high-potential iGaming startups. Subscribe to “15 Minute Mastery” for concise, high-value content and stay ahead in the competitive world of iGaming.
No more calls when there is no need for a call. If this can be done in a room format, go for it. If this can be done in like easy text format on Telegram, go for it. But no more calls. I'm at the position where I cannot afford, you know, spending time on something which is not creating a value either now or in five years time. You're listening to 15-minute mastery. A show that empowers you with insights from leading iGaming experts to enhance your personal or business performance. The show is brought to you by the AI-powered Data Analytics Platform Blask and supported by Ted Given Affiliate and Media Company already media. Lala stars the leading casino partnership program and next.io, the world's iGaming community. Hello and welcome back to 15-minute mastery. Today, we're pulling back the curtain on productivity with co-host Demetri Belenin. Demetri is a hands-on investor, frequent traveler and prolific content creator and he juggles multiple roles seemingly with ease. But the question we want to ask today is what's the reality behind this high-performance lifestyle? Demetri, we're excited to learn about your strategies for getting things done and staying sharp in this fast-paced industry. Hey John, it's always nice to be here and let's go. So, let's set the scene. Can you walk us through what a typical day looks like in your busy schedule? Yeah, I think there are two realities. You know, being back in the home office or traveling somewhere because you mentioned I travel a lot. So I think this is where two different worlds could come in place. So being at home, I mean, it doesn't really matter whether it's a work day or a holiday. It's pretty much looking the same. I try to build a routine in a very repeatable and kind of very consistent manner where I wake up very early, I have a lot of time spent with myself just to set things right for the day ahead. And then usually, yeah, it's a lot of calls. It's a lot of short meetings. It's a lot of, I mean, always happening online. This is where I avoid a lot of time spent on the travel and I try to keep these calls less than 30 minutes, most of the time, to be able to fit as much of them as possible. And usually, yeah, it's a lot of calls. It's a lot of chatting on the messengers, groups, emails and just spending a lot of time in front of my laptop. But usually, it's like 10 to 12 hours work day spent every single day, I think, since December last year. I think you're being pretty modest there with that 10 to 12, considering I get messengers at all hours of the day and night. But OK, so that's an overview of your schedule. But what daily practices do you implement into your routine to keep yourself mentally sharp, physically energized, both when you're working at home and when you're traveling? Yeah, so when traveling is much tougher, but usually when I wake up, I wake up early. I try to wake up before everyone else. So I have some time for myself without any distractions. Usually, it's around 6.30am, no matter the countries. It's very tough to manage the same schedule when in the business trip. But 6.30am, trying to wake up with the first sunlight, not looking at the devices, going outside, breathing fresh air, looking at the first light, doing some breathing techniques, trying to refresh my body with some stretches, with some rope jumping, some push-ups, walking, breathing. So trying to launch my body before I go to a seat in front of my laptop for such a long time, try to give myself a little bit of a kick before I sit. Another thing which has helped me a lot is obviously drinking a lot of water, so making myself hydration, probably drink around five liters throughout the day. I use certain things which are called water drops to keep my hydration always. Spot-on, I'm drinking various non-sighs. So yeah, I'm using something which is called water drop, which is like no sugar, no artificial. I'm using something which is called water drop, which is just like daisy supplement to keep me hydrated in a very smart and engaging manner, where you can taste different taste tests to drink water, but still at the same time, just to make this water feel different all the time. And yeah, when the day starts, I try to be very focused on the things happening in front of me. You know, the calls, chats, some productivity and stuff like that. So I try to not be distracted on any of the calls coming from the outside. So it's impossible to give me a call throughout the day. You know, most of my messengers are blocked from the calls. You cannot call me on the cell phone line, even if the carrier is coming. That is always someone at my house who, you know, open in the door, etc. So I keep myself as much further away from distractions as possible. And I think this giving me an opportunity to be as focused as much as possible. I try to keep myself less distracted on the chat during the calls, because I think I mentioned this in one of my early essays. If you feel like you're wasting the time on the call, you should be leaving this call immediately, right? And I think most of my calls throughout the day, they look like calls where I'm the one or either one of the few people who are, you know, creating some impact on the call, rather than just being someone who is listening for the call. If there is me and there's a need for me to be listened to something, I'd rather read it because, you know, it just saves me like 30 to 40, something minutes of being on the call. So I think, yeah, to summarize this, everything I just said, trying to set my day right with spending time with myself, no distractions, no screen light, going outside, breathing some fresh air, you know, looking at the first slide, some little body physics practices. And then, you know, when throughout the day, just walking myself from any possible distractions and prioritizing the schedule in the way where I don't have any meetings or conversations or calls where I'm wasting my time on being unproductive. So one of the key things I've noticed over your evolution over the past nine months is how you delegate and manage your workload. How do you decide what to delegate and what to handle personally? Yeah, yeah, I think it's a very good question. And I think a lot of especially young managers who come through the face of scaling of their teams, they've been either afraid to delegate because they feel like attention is drowning from them and they're losing their power and they're losing their impact. So I think this is where, you know, I'm coming from the completely opposite direction. And since day one, even early in my career, I was a big fan of delegation and empowering against, you know, being a bottleneck and doing everything myself. Obviously, I'm still being a bottleneck in so many places, but it's just the process of a natural evolution of what we're going through right now. If you think about the organization we're building, just for a second, it's almost 1,000 people combined within all the companies within the group right now. And if you think about the approach we've taken since day one, it was very hands-on, very operationally involved, very, you know, kind of straight into the business rather than, you know, rather than advisory or consultancy format. So this is where I found myself in saying they exhausted and being a biggest bottleneck on the planet. So what I think I started applying and this is what I've always done in the past is the 80% rule. So if there is something which can be done 80% as good as you could have done it yourself, then you should go for it, right? Every single time there is something I'm doing, I'm asking myself this question. If this task can be done by someone within the organization or there is someone whom we need to hire to be able to do something, right? I think when you ask this question and apply this or like try to think about it from the perspective of every single process you're dealing with daily, you see this whole thing so clearly, then you can understand, okay, this could be done by, I don't know, the content manager. This could be done by head of operations. This is like a head of affiliates or this is like business development or all, etc. So you start understanding, all right, I'm not the one who is like doing everything on my own. I'm the one who needs to set things right and delegate things right. So I think delegation has been probably one of my biggest lessons throughout my almost 10 plus years mental management career where I started thinking less about being afraid of someone taking my role and thinking from the perspective of, okay, I need to bring in more smart people. I need to empower these smart people and I need to give them the opportunity to reveal their hidden talent and to be able to replace myself, which is great, right? But not replace my role or replace my place in the company, but replace myself from some of the routines which business has daily and then so I can be able to go higher onto the new journey and to be able to go back to visionary things. Because let's take our organization, right? Media is the big part and media is the big part of the leverage. And you've been on this journey with me since day one and even since day minus one, right? And you've seen it all how it's been built and how the whole content was written, how everything we've done in the past and you're the part of this process as well. So tell me someone who's seen it all from the side, how this delegation role applies, how we try to juggle all these complex content schemes and frameworks in all place. Yeah, no, it's a good question because I think that, like you say, media leverage is a big part of the strategy, but sometimes and we know we've had this feedback personally from people on the outside is how can you be everywhere at once? How can you be publishing on LinkedIn? How can you be publishing these enormous newsletters yet still oversee eight businesses that you're invested into, right? And the answer to that is very simply systems. If you take the content system, for example, the process for writing content has roughly four stages, you've got ideation, you've got the knowledge, you've got the writing, and then the publication, right? The publication doesn't need to be handled by you. Even the writing doesn't need to be handled by you, right? Because that is just how you articulate a specific idea. However, the knowledge absolutely needs to come from you. There's no way of scaling that or delegating that. And then the ideation can be done in collaboration with you. So what some people might see as a long, arduous task of writing a newsletter that might take three or four hours, if they sat down to do it personally, we've been able to minimize that to maybe 20 minutes of your time, where there will be a call where you share your expertise and knowledge, and it's just down to the writer to articulate it, or for a LinkedIn post, it might be a voice note that's shared on Telegram that the content system then turns into a post right. So with the right systems, it's amazing what you can scale around someone who's really busy, and although it does give the impression that what else is he doing with his time, it's just a very specific and I'll say smart approach to scaling a expert's expertise. So the other thing that I'll just dive into next is obviously one thing that comes within your role and everything that you're involved in at the moment is you do have a lot of demands placed on you, right? And with so many opportunities, there's so many things you can do. How do you decide what to say no to? Can you share an example of a time when saying no was crucial to your productivity? Yeah, so as I mentioned, the organization right now in the state where we got eight companies there on the various stages, some of these companies are being built, some of these companies, they just launched or some of these companies are going through an insane scaling routine where we're investing like tens of millions of dollars within these companies. So this is where demand towards my time is becoming one of the biggest problems I have ever had. The demand to have a little call, the demand of using my knowledge or demand to be able to use my vision to create a new market strategy or things like this is becoming impossible to scale. So this is where, as you mentioned, I had to start taking rough and sometimes ruthless decisions on how to cut the things where I either should not be involved or I should not be spending like even a minute of my time. And probably calls has been one of these parts because if you want to jump on every single call, everyone proposes you, your time has gone tomorrow, right? This is where I said no more calls, right? No more calls when there is no need for a call. If this can be done in a room format, go for it. If this can be done in like easy text format on telegram, go for it. But no more calls, no more hourly calls, no more 45 minutes calls. The max time for the call I've spent probably in the last, I don't know, two or three months after I've introduced the drill was 45 minutes, right? And this is where I think after 45 minutes, the productivity drops and everyone just there, you know, wasting the time. So I think I'm not a fan of calls or long meetings at all any longer. So I think after that, a lot of people went mad at me like how come you could not accept the call with me? How come you cannot meet me at conference, at the event? I'm like, what is the reason for that meeting? What is the value of that meeting? What is the outcome of that meeting, right? Spending a time for a little catch up, spending a time for for, I don't know, cheap challenge is not how you build, you know, long term sustainable, scalable businesses. And I'm at the position where I cannot effort, you know, spending time on something which is not creating a value either now or in five years time. So I think, I think this has been probably the biggest change in my routine since forever, where I was always available for the calls with anyone. I was always here if you, you know, need to spend some time on something, you know, but not anymore. And this is where, you know, sometimes some of the messages on telegram or WhatsApp are, you know, being me sometimes, you know, not really being missed, but not being satisfied with, you know, proper attention where, you know, if you look in for something which, you know, it just goes beyond my commitment or goes so far beyond what you expect me to do, then it just comes down to like a very basic reply just for the sake of time consumption. So I think, I think my biggest, my biggest setup for this year is to become a ruthless productivity machine where, you know, I can use me and scale myself and inject myself and my knowledge into all of these organizations. And you know, what is being seen from the outside, especially on the media side, you know, you know, a lot of content created, a lot of value given, but the biggest value is given behind. And probably what you see from the outside is like, you're not even 1% of what is happening on behind. So this is where I think, you know, I could even, I mean, I keep saying this, but this is where I can even like write a productivity book on how to, you know, how to be a monster of productivity and how to be able to, you know, maintain this lifestyle of a longer period of time. Yeah, and it's really interesting, you say about saying no to calls. And I think the apprehension a lot of people would have around that is they'll be scared of pissing people off. But from the other side of that, where I've been one of those people asking Dimitri for a call and he's essentially told me to f off, you very quickly kind of question yourself and think, Oh, actually, is a call needed for that? But we saw every single one of us are often so in the habit of saying, Oh, let's have a quick call that you don't stop to think actually can just be handled in a more efficient way, right? But that brings this episode to a wrap. And this is a conversation that we could probably have for an hour. So I'm sure we will do more along these lines because we've just scratched the surface. But thanks for sharing Dimitri. There's again, so much value in this one. Thanks, John. I hope it was really useful for everyone. [BLANK_AUDIO]
