¶ Preview and Introduction
you're familiar with this as an agency owner . I would wake up and I'd be like , okay , well , time to work , crack my knuckles , and then I would just pull up my email and say , okay , whatever emergencies in here is my most important thing and it's my priority for the day . And the majority of them were actually kind of my fault .
And they're not my fault because I created the emergency . They were my fault because I created the situation and the lack of boundaries with my clients that allowed them to think that anything they thought was an emergency was an emergency .
The right person is a hundred times more valuable than an okay , fit person , and so I took a bunch of time investing in that upfront . And now I have the rewards where I have this team . They're all insanely competent . They know my clients . They're really good . The number one hack that works for me that I can recommend and listen .
Everyone's different , but for me I do not eat until I'm done work . Hi , rich , let's kick off man .
First , you might want to say I've loved a lot of your content for the last couple of months , right , I've really really enjoyed it and there's been different aspects that I've just learned so much from . And in the lead up to this session , I always do some research , right , and I was like you know what ?
I'm going to go back through your work less manifesto , which I think is a good overarching theme for today to walk through , and I was like I'm going to implement these ideas and see what I can do . So , as I mentioned to you , like my company , like there's a lot , a lot of work involved , a lot of work and everything involved .
And I started to apply your principles of really cutting up distractions , and that means just closing down WhatsApp , Slack , all this kind of stuff , only focusing on , like the top 80% and also really just trying to remove anything I don't need , so just saying no a lot more .
And I was able to bring my like 12 hour , 15 hour workdays genuinely down to starting at 5am , because I like starting early and probably finishing at around 4pm with going to the gym in the middle of the day , sorry so that's okay .
That counts .
Okay , that's good . So so I would say I eliminated nearly 50% of my work from just following your guide for for about a week , so it's been incredibly helpful . So I can't imagine how it's affected you and other people , but that's going to be a great , a great kind of segue into the manifesto for today . As a point , Nice , nice .
Yeah , man , what I've noticed is that I've worked with a lot of business owners , entrepreneurs , things like that , and by default we tend to have this like mindset that there will always be time for everything right and that when we don't set any boundaries or containers around the time that we work , you think , oh , I can work anytime , and you just end up
working every time right , 24 , seven , and I was totally guilty of that . I mean , the reason that I got into this stuff was because I was really solving my own problem that I created , you know , years back . I've been running a design agency for over a decade now and , yeah
¶ The 4 Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris
, I hit the same brick wall that you know . You kind of probably feel like you're up against right now , where I at that point in my business I was really maxed out on time and I was maxed out on money , so there wasn't any more time left in the week .
I know for me it was like 70 , 80 hour weeks and I felt like I had hit a plateau on income because I couldn't do any more client fulfillment right . There was no time to bring in any more business because I was fully stretched them .
So this was about like five , six years ago and I had this like epiphany that how I was spending my time was not working and I was actually on vacation and I picked up a book that I'm sure many of your listeners have read maybe you've read it for our work week by Tim Ferriss . It's a classic . Highly recommend it if you haven't read it .
And there were just some principles that were shared in that book that I didn't even know you could do right , like .
I think the biggest things that I didn't really understand I had the option to do as a business owner were things like saying no , setting boundaries with my clients , right , like the one that really broke my brain was like that I don't have to check my email every five minutes throughout the entire day and that you could literally just check your email like two
or three times a day and batch it and still get the same results . And it was just these kinds of like insights that I just took it and ran with and over the next couple of years I really went from the point of like total burnout to basically , you know , tripling or quadrupling my income .
You know , going up to 500k a year and working like 10 , 15 hours a week running this agency and all that is kind of what led me to start to share the stuff online and put together the Workless Manifesto and just how I think about running a small business .
There's a lot of in that , because the reason why I think you grew so quickly is because a lot of people are in my bracket right .
They feel overwhelmed , they feel overburdened and they feel like it's normal but of course , it's not normal to be doing these things that if you want to even achieve like a lot of stuff , you don't have to sacrifice everything to do it .
Of course you need to be focused , but , as to your point , you need to be very tailored , focused , and the four hour work week is great . It's been years since I read it , maybe like six , seven years or something , but I think Tim Ferriss mentioned that he checks emails like once a week . Was it something like that that he brought it there ?
Yeah , yeah , I mean , listen , I think there's levels to this stuff , of course , you know , and it's a spectrum , so if Tim's at one a week , that's pretty good .
I've been hearing about some people that are at the point where they're like I just don't check email anymore , right , someone else checks my email and if the people that need to contact me , they have my phone number and you know , I think there's always levels of delegation and letting go to this stuff .
But I think what most people find is that , like , the real work that matters in their business doesn't happen in their email . You know , the email is just a tool and we treat it as a to-do list and I know I was so guilty of that . I would wake up in the morning and maybe you're familiar with this as an agency owner .
I would wake up and I'd be like okay , well , time to work , crack my knuckles , and then I would just pull up my email and say , okay , whatever emergencies in here is my most important thing and is my priority for the day , as opposed to like , oh well , I actually own a business and maybe I should spend my time working on my business and part of it is
what's in my inbox but part of it is owning the business and I think that was kind of the key lesson and starting to realize also , like most emergencies aren't really emergencies and the majority of them were actually kind of my fault , and they're not my fault because I created the emergency .
They were my fault because I created the situation and the lack of boundaries with my clients that allowed them to think that anything they thought was an emergency was an emergency .
And the emergencies of , like you know , a broken system , whether it's design or for me , it could be podcasting is down to systematizing , documenting , you know , putting actual the pillars in place , which I want to get into as well , right , like , how do we build these actual systems , which I think is going to be a huge part .
So , getting into the work less manifesto , which I think is I don't know where did you get the idea for it ?
but first , what was it so ? Okay , my , I'll just give you a little bit of background about how I ended up on the internet , because it's kind of unusual . I for most people that you know found me online .
It's kind of like I appeared out of nowhere , because I basically have been existing as a business owner for over a decade in the real world , you know , or the world of you know , doing , shaking and meetings and all that stuff .
And you know , I grew my entire agency this whole time even up to 500 K without social media and without the internet and basically just based on referrals , relationships and just like doing quality work over a long period of time .
So when I got onto the internet , I had not used social media for business at all and to this day I don't get clients for my agency from this stuff that I do . Right , I treat them as two separate businesses . I'm not trying to say , hey , while you're at it , come , you know , to my design agency , because one probably not a good fit for the agency .
We could talk about the business model
¶ Finding the Right Mentor
later . But the point of the story is that I was working with a business coach and maybe you've seen him . He's actually has a really big YouTube channel . His name is Chris Doe , from the future .
He's on YouTube . He's coming on my show soon .
Oh sweet , okay , Well , yeah . So Chris was and is my business coach . So I actually hired him to help me and when I initially started working with him , I had a handful of questions about my agency related to like the kind of final pieces that I needed to figure out around delegation and project management and stuff like that .
And I went to the source and , as an aside , I feel like I got a really good deal on working with Chris because when I was working with him he was only charging only a meager $1,000 an hour for his coaching services . He's now charging $5,000 an hour . So I bought an eight coaching package .
I was like , listen , dude , I've got money , let me just lock you in . And I feel like I kind of got 40 grand worth of coaching for eight . So that was helpful . Anyway , chris and I worked together the agency stuff .
We did about three sessions before it became pretty clear that I was making a lot of money and not working a lot of hours and there was time to figure out what's next and I was like I kind of want to like start either writing or talking about my philosophy around work and how I got into this .
And he was like All right , what you need to do is get out a piece of paper and start writing down everything that you think about work and you know , really kind of make it into a manifesto and talk about you know , how you work , how you approach your business , what are the principles behind it , and then kind of start sharing that stuff online .
So the only reason that I am even on this podcast today is because Christo was like hey , maybe you should start talking about this stuff online . And you know , there was no , I wasn't really planning to like , put together a course or anything like that .
Like I , it was an experiment and it ended up resonating with people a lot faster than I thought it would , and then all this other stuff has kind of come from that .
That shows , like the power of having the people in your network , right , that you can leverage those influences . Like you paid for the mentorship and I worked there perfectly well in that regard , right it's it's probably been more than 40k . You've gotten back in coaching . You've probably gotten much more .
Oh yeah , I was . You know what's crazy is the first session that we did together . I talked about this , so you know this commeta , I have a podcast as well .
It's not an interview podcast , it's kind of just me talking , but in in my podcast I actually recently put out two episodes and they're called lessons from $8,000 of coaching with Chris Doe and actually went back and you know we record all the sessions and I had took really detailed notes and I went through the process of looking at , you know , the last two
years of coaching sessions happening , you know , every couple of months and distilled all the insights and lessons that I learned into those two episodes and what I found was in the first lesson that we did , chris actually taught me something and gave me a referral that ended up saving my business probably somewhere between 60 and 100 grand in that first year that
you know we were working together , so I made money , I profited off of the first transaction and I think that's really the beauty of you know , finding the right mentor and you know someone who's in alignment with what you're doing .
That's so interesting man . It's funny because in some regards he was very different than you , and then obviously then other aspects .
Then he brought you up from like the content perspective , for instance , you know the sharing , the stories , and then now there's so many similarities between you but it's almost as if , like that evolution happened over time , which is like that's exactly what the idea of a mentor right , they're bringing you up and they're uplifting you .
All right , people , we're just going to take one short little break for a little update about podcast university . So if you enjoy podcasts like this and you want to start your own podcast , head into the links down below the pockets university . This is a learning platform that I've built to help people like you build , launch and scale your own podcast .
I wasted many years doing this , making it all up as a lot as I go , so I put everything together in a very seamless and easy to follow course for you guys to follow and just learn exactly how to do it .
So if you want to bypass a lot of the mess with your podcast , check out the links down below the pockets university and we'll show you exactly how to launch and scale your own podcast . So getting into those points right . So I work on the right thing . I work on the right thing , not anything
¶ Identifying The Right Tasks To Focus On
Now that's so valuable because of the fact that we chase our heels , we put it to next fire . How do you determine what are the right things to work on , especially when you're like starting a business or just getting off the ground in the first couple of years ?
Sure Okay . So when you're first starting your business honestly , the more I think about this , because when people come to me , more often than not they are trying to go from like 10 to 100 , not zero to one or one to 10 . I tend to work with established business owners because most of the problems that I solve come with growing a business .
So in a lot of ways , there's no substitute or shortcut in the beginning for just screwing up and sucking . I think there are certain level of reps that you need to do . You need to be bad , you need to learn things . There are ways to speed up the process and accelerate it , but I had a whole five-year dark ages of my business where I didn't .
So this was basically from 2011 to 2016 . And did I do that math right ? Yeah , 2011 to 2016 , where the internet was not what it is today . The amount of resources that are available now for business owners online is insane . It's like a gold mine . But in 2011 , it wasn't really like that .
There was some tiny things , but I was like on my own and just learning the hard way and learning really slowly and screwing up . So I think early on there's no substitute for that , but thinking about working on the right thing versus anything . I think we can break it up into two parts .
Start with anything Like we were talking about at the beginning of this episode .
What most people do when they sit down at their desk is they open up their email or they open up social media , or they find the first task that seems relatively easy and satisfying to complete and they just go and do that and then their entire day becomes this string of not meaningless but dopamine-inducing small tasks that are not really moving the needle on
what matters in their business . And when I say focus on the right thing , not everything or anything , I'm really asking you , as a business owner , to take the time to focus on tasks at least one or two a day that are really going to move the needle .
And the way that I think about it what should you do as a business owner is there's two tasks in your business . I think about it like maintenance tasks and growth tasks , and everyone in a business if you own a small business or a solopreneur or whatever you have these both types of tasks that you need to do .
So maintenance tasks are your day-to-day work that are going to allow your business to run at the current level of income and input . So when I say income , that's how much money you're making . Input is the amount of hours that you're working . These tasks are required , right , they're .
Even for this business , the one that I have now , there's a certain amount of maintenance tasks that I have to do every week in order to keep the wheels rolling right . I need to teach the cohort when it comes up three times a year , I need to create the content you know my weekly email .
I need to record the podcast schedule , the social media posts , and I have a lot of systems built around these maintenance tasks . But , like , they just need to happen and there's no way around that . And what I see most business owners do is their schedule is 90% maintenance tasks . So they say yes to so many different things .
Right , they're like I've got the podcast and the YouTube channel and the streetwear brand and the , you know , like the yoga studio , whatever , right , they have a million things and they're just trying to keep the wheels spinning on all these different things and , as a result , they really stay at the same level for a really long time , because there's no time for
growth tasks . And growth tasks are the opposite side of the coin , and I think about these like tasks that are actually going to create growth in your income or tasks that will decrease your input . So the amount of hours that you need to work and growth tasks are different .
Right , they are the types of things that actually build a business and move the needle , and you need to take time to do them , and you know examples . Would be as simple as you know strategy for your business . You know what are your actual goals . What's important ?
Delegating just straight up , eliminating things , saying hey , this isn't important , we're going to stop doing it as a policy .
You know automation , building leverage , and what I find is that the people that really do well figure out how to spend less than 50% of their time on maintenance tasks and the other 50% or more is spent on these growth tasks that really move the needle in the business and push things forward . You know things like .
You know building systems you know , the less sexy stuff .
What ? What you think that's sexy .
The less sexy , less sexy stuff , less sexy , yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah .
So there's like , and I also think of them like business owner tasks are the growth tasks and employee tasks are the maintenance tasks , and for better or worse , they both happen . You have to do them . There's no way around it . It doesn't matter who you are . And there's better maintenance tasks , right , there's more leverage maintenance tasks .
But if there are always going to be things that like , if you just stop doing them completely , eventually things are going to go down .
Alex Ramose uploaded a video recently called how to Get so Rich . You Questioned a Meaning of Money and he references focus in it . And to your point about the cheap dopamine .
You know , we can all put up that tweet or that reel or that post on LinkedIn and sure , yeah , it drives like engagement , whatever , but that's not what's actually building like the business he was like .
If you focus on the really , really boring stuff so let's say , the systems or the sales team instead of you doing the sales , you work your ass off to get the best sales team and then to train them and do like script reviews , do all this kind of stuff over time , so then you have this huge opportunity for you to grow your business .
Right , and his goals could be different than your goals , for sure , right , but it's about building out those actual systems versus all the stuff that gives you the cheap dopamine and all the basic shit , right , so stuff that makes you feel like you're making a lot of moves but you're feeling busy , not actually being busy .
I think there's a lot of parallels there about that having that extreme focus and setting the boundaries right On actually being able to spend money and use your time effectively . You have a bunch of freelancers or contractors who work in and around your business .
How do you , how have you designed like , let's say , your design agency in such a way that you're able to leverage that and be able to remove yourself from it , because you are the expert and you've 13 years experience in design ?
Do you ever feel like you're being pushed into the business to do a lot of these tasks , whereby you are not working on the business anymore ?
Yeah , great question . I think it's helpful to explain the structure of my agency and then it allows the delegation game plan to make sense .
¶ Scaling a Design Agency to $500,000
A lot of times when people hear , oh , you've got a $500,000 design agency , that must be a ton of work and you must be like really busy all the time and there must be a ton of stuff going on .
And the way that I approach the business is I really set a cap on how big I want this business to be and I have some kind of guide rails around how I want to scale the business .
And I think if you wanna work less and you want a business like mine because , let's be clear , not everyone wants a business like mine , and when I work with people I tell them upfront you can design any kind of business you want . If you wanna work less than five hours a day , that's cool . If you wanna work 10 hours a day , that's cool too .
But I just want you to actually have your actions be in alignment with what you want and what your goal is . And I think that these tools and these frameworks work for people that are either trying to invest their free time and their productivity back into their business or invest it into their freedom and having a life outside of business .
Now I'm more on the freedom side of things , but you need to know this stuff either way if you wanna grow . So the constraints that I set around my agency were I set a minimum rate .
So for my agency that is $60,000 a year and that's either gonna be a monthly retainer of $5,000 a month over 12 months or a one big project of 60K or more , or a combination of the two , so something like a $30,000 project plus $2,500 a month and as a result , I have scaled my business by increasing price instead of increasing the amount of clients that I
service .
So over the last 10 years , rather than follow the instinct that many agency owners and business people get sucked into , which is we will scale by getting more customers , I wanna scale by having higher prices and working with the same customers longer and as a result , I'm at $500,000 a year , but I'm only working with six to nine , maybe 10 , clients total a year
and , as a result , you get a ton of really incredible benefits from working with the same clients over and over , because there's a massive , massive cost associated with bringing on new clients and also with losing clients , because when I talk to agency owners that have like 50 , 100 , 200 clients , the biggest problem is , like Jesus , like I'm onboarding 24 seven ,
I'm losing clients .
All the time I'm training my team , we have to learn the business of each client , one at a time , and instead , if you have five clients or 10 clients , you get the economies of scale of being able to work with them over a long period of time and , as a result , your team knows your clients and you know the type of projects that you're working on .
So , like if you were to ask me okay , rich , for this ex-client , I could tell you what their entire yearly plan , goals , schedule , milestones , everything that's coming up off the top of my head because I'm not keeping track of 10 million clients , I'm only keeping track of a small group .
So when you say , okay , how did you get to $500,000 a year , it's not that many clients you know , and they're all just on monthly retainers or big projects . And if I have like $100,000 website project that we do in a year , plus a couple of retainer clients that we've been working with for many years . You know four , five , six .
It's just not that complicated . And you know there is a way to run your business that is not complicated . Most people just don't see it and that makes it easy to delegate , because when I show up to work with the clients , I'm responsible for three things . There's a million different tasks that I can do in my business .
We are like full service , which means that any kind of creative need that the client has we're gonna be able to do for them .
The way that we pitch clients is I call it , you know , a $200,000 a year art director on your staff for 60K , you know , and it's everything that you possibly need video animation , design , branding , strategy , marketing communication all under one roof and I'm really only responsible for three things .
I'm responsible for managing the clients , responsible for strategy , which is honestly where the clients get the most value . One thing that . Chris Doe says all the time is you know , the strategy is what the client pays for . The design is like the party favors or the gift bag . It's the implementation .
Right , the thing that is a commodity is the implementation and you know the graphics or the branding or whatever . And the strategy is where the actual value is created . So it's client management strategy and then high level design . So really just like the top , top , top of the funnel , I will be hands on .
And then I have a team of like 10 to 15 trusted freelancers who I've been working with for years . I've gone through a long process of vetting and I've worked with a ton .
I think the biggest freelancer hack or you know , contractor hack I can give people is , if you're not having good luck with it , you just you're not doing enough interviews and you're not doing enough reps with finding the right people , Because if you've never found the right freelancer , it's like the gates of heaven open .
You know , it's like the right person is 100 times more valuable than an okay , fit person , and so I took a bunch of time investing in that upfront and now I have the rewards where I have this team . They're all insanely competent , they know my clients . They're really good and , as a result , you know , I've got this
¶ Investing In A Good Team
business where we serve clients at a high level and there's not that many of them , and I have no desire to make it much bigger than how it currently is .
All right , guys . One short little update for Vox . I want to give a short overview about my own company , my media company called Vox . So if you are a company or you are an enterprise looking to grow your brand and looking to grow your podcast , feel free to reach out to work with us at Vox .
What we do is a fully fledged end to end management of your podcast . We take care of the strategy , the consulting , we take care of the growth , the management . We take care of all the editing , all the boring stuff that you can focus on creating good podcasts and create and growing your brand .
If you want to grow your podcast and get to new users , if you want to grow your business , generate more revenue and all that good stuff , check out the links down below to Vox . You can follow through to schedule a call with our team or else you can fill out the application form to see if you qualify to work with us .
Thank you , I absolutely love that man . I really love it because I feel like that the agency where agencies can fall down on is the fact that they're going for more and more and more and more and more , and it could be some of the courses right , some of the OG like marketing courses .
I try to get you to focus on sales and marketing and bringing people in , and I cost of acquisition as well .
It can be just so crazy , right , that getting a new client is just so costly that it might cost you 20,000 to acquire them because you're running ads for so many months , okay , and then it's so difficult to fulfill them , whereas I've done something I guess something quite similar where we've a long-term contract anything up to 18 months , right and as a result
it's easier to walk through this and delegate and walk through it . But I guess for you you've got to the next level whereby you really do have the systems and the team in place for them to run autonomously .
And you remind me of very similar of Tim Stoddard as well , who has his Stoddzi internet marketing , and I went through his course , actually , and he breaks it up really nicely . He was like you have like five different buckets .
You have sales and marketing , accounting , fulfillment , and I think it's a client success and you should only be on one side , which is like sales and marketing , doing the strategy work , and then everything else you should be hiring and he's a fantastic quote , it's every soul should have a role , so you should hire into those positions , but they should only do one
thing . If you're asking someone to do design and all this stuff , it just doesn't work right . They have to be narrowly focused on that . So , especially within what you so you mentioned that you do a lot of different creative work . How do you build the systems Like what's happening in the backend ? Do you operate on Slack ?
Do you operate through XAPIER Automations ? How do you work that in the backend ?
Yeah , so there's a couple of things going on .
Number one is when you only have like six to 10 clients that you're working with a year , it makes it really easy to do project management and to have systems and SOPs , like when we talked about the agencies that are like I want 50 clients or I want 100 clients or 200 clients , then you need like bulletproof , crazy SOPs for every process , right ?
You want to automate like the contract getting sent and the welcome message and you know the next steps and uploading everything to the clients dropbox and all that stuff , right ? For me it's not as big of an issue . You know , I'll probably onboard two clients a year and we have SOPs for it .
But you can really give them that personal attention when you first bring them on and you know a good fit client for me is Going to be someone who works with us for over a year . So I'm happy to say no to a client if they're like listen , I really just have this one little tiny project and there's . There's nothing else I have planned . That's not a fit .
So part of Only serving a small group of clients a year is you're leaving money on the table 100% and you have to be fine with that , knowing that you want your best fit clients and you want to over deliver for them and Not worry about anything else .
¶ Efficient Business Communications
So the systems outside of fulfillment , so just everything around communication and , like you know , client success and you know all the other accounting Are , they're pretty automated . We do a client portal in Notion , which allows clients to communicate back and forth with us . Everything that we do is asynchronous .
We try to keep it to one meeting a week , which is another hack . So I schedule all the client meetings one day a week and they're all batched in a row and the clients have the opportunity to come or cancel it .
But the idea is that once a week for you know , 30 minutes or so we can get together and talk about whatever needs to be discussed , you know , the project that's coming up , the schedule , and that just provides a standing touch point .
That then also allows me to have the rest of the time to Work efficiently and do deep work and actually get the client stuff done .
So rather than having like ad hoc meetings where it's just like , oh , when I think of something , I send you an email and then we book a call , I find it's actually more efficient to have standing regular meetings because then emergencies Magically just like don't happen Because there's kind of there's constant communication . All right .
So for fulfillment for my agency I do things a little bit differently .
There's kind of two schools of thoughts on this , because where I feel like one of my core competencies is Is is client management and the relationship , and because the strategy is such an important component of the value that we provide , I Insulate my freelancers and contractors 100% from the client .
They're not on client calls , they are not working directly with the client and I think that really benefits them in the long run because they're not dealing with like crazy Requests . They don't have to be like oh my god , I just got an email from the client at 2 am . Should I answer it Like why aren't they contacting rich ? They just asked me for an edit .
That's like we didn't talk about all the stuff . So there is a firewall between the freelancers and the clients and everyone I've worked with Frankly is much happier with that thing because they only deal with me and we do everything in notion 100% asynchronously in my agency .
So I probably have not had a freelancer Business meeting like on zoom to discuss a project in over a year . We do everything via loom videos and in notion , and it's a really simple process . It's it's not that complicated Because the unlock is that when you work with a team for a really long period of time , they start to understand everything that's going on .
So I'm not bringing people up to speak constantly , like an example would be . I have a freelancer who's a designer , a graphic designer , and she's been working with some of my clients on their projects for years .
So when the next project comes in , you know she already knows what the brand is , what the brief is , what their strategy is , you know what the assets look like , because she probably already made some of them , or maybe it's a project that happens once a year and she's like oh , I remember doing this last year .
You know , I'll start from the file that we built last time . So , rather than like having to constantly replace people and train people , I find that the long-term relationships , both on the client side and on the freelancer side , just make the fulfillment delegation process really , really smooth .
I love that man .
I feel like that you're personally positioned , personally too , like you have the relationships , be able to Communicate that really well between your team and give them the success like let them learn , let them adapt and then keep them in the company , keep them in the organization and then you can manage your relationship side of things of the client , which is
fantastic . You have to balance the neck between the two and you're not being bombarded , right . I want to switch gears into more the personal side of things . So you are a big dude on tracking your time and you've been able to analyze your time Efficiency , I guess , over over the long run . I've never done this .
I've seen a lot of people mention this previously . How do you go about tracking your time and kind of what benefit have you seen , even personally , or even like scientific leagues ? I know you do a lot of research into some research papers around productivity in general too .
Yeah , man , I think honestly time tracking if you own a business , there's no excuse to not track your time . As an entrepreneur , your time is your most valuable asset , right ? It's even more valuable than money . It is the one thing that you have that you can personally apply to your business In order to move the needle forward .
So when I hear people that are like , yeah , I like worked a hundred hours last week and I don't even know what the hell I did all week and I feel like nothing got done , I'm like , okay , well , you need to start with clarity about what the hell it is that you're actually doing with your time .
So I started tracking my time formally probably over five years ago , and I have been doing it every day since then in my business . So , to be clear , on a daily basis , I do not track my personal time when I'm not working on my business , I am not like a .
¶ Improving Productivity with Time Tracking
I think one of the the big misunderstandings that people have about productivity in general is it's about fitting more shit into your day and just cramming as much as possible . And for me , like the definition that I like to use , which I got from Twitter I can't remember Whoever said this you're , you're awesome . I don't .
I'm gonna paraphrase it so I don't think it's a direct quote . But for me productivity is about getting the outcome that you want , and if you get it you're productive , and if you don't , you're not . And that really removes the pressure to fit everything in and to be super efficient and to also be busy all the time .
So I'm ruthless with my time when it comes to work and then when that turns off , it's like a totally different thing . You know I have hobbies . I like to just go hiking or hang out or whatever I'm like .
The work part is is dialed in and really kind of compartmentalized and structured , and then when that stops I don't feel like I need to track my time and , like you know , track every area of my life outside of that , which is different from a lot of productivity people .
But anyway , of course , time tracking , the tool that I love to use is called toggle to GG L , I think they're . They have a suite of products , but the time tracking piece of it is called toggle track . That's the piece of software that I've been using for five years and when I sit down to work I Basically have toggle open .
It's like probably my most used tab on my computer and I just mark whatever tasks that I'm doing and I run the time tracking and the beauty of this is it allows me to identify , like we talked about in the beginning of this conversation , what types of tasks am I doing , how much time am I spending on those maintenance tasks , the things that just have to get
done , and how much time I spending on , you know , the growth tasks , the things that are going to build leverage and actually move the needle and move the ball forward . And if you try track your time for Week or two weeks , you're gonna find out a lot of Disturbing truths about what actually goes on versus the story we tell ourselves about what's going on .
And and even now , like I'll look back at some weeks and be like , hey , there's like a lot of room for improvement here in terms of you know what do I say yes to you , how do I spend my time , you know what could I be delegating that I'm not willing to let go of ?
And Honestly , I think time tracking is like the number one Entrepreneur hack and people will say , oh , my god , it's so time-consuming , it's really hard . It's not I , I . I promise is that it's a skill and once you get good at it , you will never even think about it again .
I don't even think about the time tracking now , and the beauty of using a tool like toggle is you can get reports . So at the end of the week you can pull up your toggle , like , let's say , and you can see .
Okay , so for me , I'll just pull up mine right now this week , let's see Monday I worked three hours and 53 minutes , tuesday I worked three hours in one minute and yesterday I worked five hours and 36 minutes , which is what average
¶ The Importance of Deep Work
day ?
most days for me I'm under five , probably somewhere between four and five , and I try to keep that ratio to like Three to four hours of deep work , really kind of focused creative stuff , either like really important client work or , you know , deep content work , strategy things like that and then I need about an hour , 30 minutes to an hour , to just take care
of , like the admin of running of two businesses . You know this , this shit that just happens . You know emails team management delegation , social media like that kind of stuff . And that's how you work , you know , for five hours a day .
How do you manage ? So you're probably familiar with contact switching , the concept of moving between different tasks , yeah , and of course , for you , for you now , at this point you know you wouldn't have the element . You sit down , you might do like a content and you might do like accounting or whatever .
Whatever that thing that you need done is is going to be dialed in . But if you're using that tool like toggle , how do you Deal with context switching in that context ? This obviously helps to remove it , but how would you track something like that if you're moving between things ?
Yeah , I mean the idea is that the most important things , the big stuff , are going to take place in large chunks of time . I think , for the most part , the stuff that really moves the needle are going to be done in increments of Hours , you know , not in five to ten minute .
So when I talked about , like , the difference between the time spent doing deep work , that might be a couple of projects , so it could be an hour of writing , it could be an hour of , you know , strategy or creation , it could be an hour of high-level design for a client , and then I have the admin time , and the admin time is basically where , all the time ,
context switching , intensive , tiny tasks take place . So what most people do is they sprinkle those tasks throughout the entire day and they're like , hey , I'm working on , you know , writing a blog post , or you know , doing some like important , deep work .
But what they don't realize is that every five minutes they check their phone , or every ten minutes they check their email , or they get distracted and they realize , oh , I need to pay that invoice or you know , oh , this important slack message just came in for my team member and I got to answer it .
Now , all that stuff gets done in a batch and you know one period where it's like okay , and then we just go down the list and you just crank it out and the deep work time is sacred . There is nothing else that is happening During the deep work time , so the phone is not in sight .
You know it's on the ground , flips up , die upside down for me , and you know I often use a tool that I recommend to people called freedom . I don't know if you've heard of this one before . It's a distraction blocking app . There's a million of them out there . They all do different things .
The two that I use often are freedom , which is freedom to , and that blocks distracting apps , and I I keep my deep work block Locked down . So all the things that I like to go to to bring me away from the work . You know YouTube , gmail , you know Instagram , whatever it is .
Everyone has this site that they're like alright , this is hard , I'm gonna go over there . And then I also use a tool for my inbox that stops messages from coming in until I'm ready to check it , and there's two that you can use .
There's one called boomerang and there's another called inbox when ready , and the idea there is that if you end up on your inbox by accident , you don't get tempted by the wave of incoming messages . So when it's time to check the messages for me , I've got this rule that I'm like Every message gets dealt with . You know , when I go down , the list .
They're either , you know , handled by a team member . You know what I've like words for them reply automate I'm sorry . Reply Archive , okay , delete .
You know , those are the three that I try to like handle so I can get to inbox here at the end , and obviously at this point , like I've got multiple inboxes going , so I've got my personal and my team handles my my course email support box , and then my agency has its own set of emails .
I Think that's the next step that I want to get to is wait the check in autoggle and freedom , and that's what's dragging that , that's what's just a little bit I mean I don't know , like start with one thing .
I think of course make the people make is that they hear you go all in really good ideas and they're like I'm gonna do all of them and the key is that these things are habits , right , and I I'm sure probably you've either heard it referenced or you've read atomic habits and Fred yeah .
I've actually . I've actually put my force . I'm a small dude . I'm like five , seven on a good day and I put my phone on the top of my kitchen . So I need a chair , I need a son , I need a son on like the the counter and I need to actually get my phone . So I put it up there deliberately .
But , of course , like , the reason where I would fall down is my laptop and because we do a lot of content , I would be like checking content on YouTube for like a client and then I would see like fucking , a podcast and I would like Click on that . You know , does that make sense ? I will get pulled in .
Or we be reviewing content on LinkedIn , like performance on LinkedIn , and I would see someone else's post , or Does that make sense ? For me , it's like the , it's the workflow , it's like it's actually the UX of like what's happening on my laptop is actually pulling me in . So that's why it's . For me , it's less like the phone or like .
I'll give you an example . I know this is not like the best for like your morning routine , but I work in a dark room in the morning when I get up and I work in a dark room and , as a result , I'm very , I'm quite dialed in , but it's just a fact that on my laptop , this is where I fall down on right and that's what's dragging me down .
It's not the extra things in the world Does that make sense ?
Totally , totally . I'll give you one other tool , since we're talking tools . So I don't know what web browser you currently use , but I use this one . I don't know if you've heard of it . It's called Arc ARC . Have you heard of this ? No , I'm using what Chrome , all right , using . I recommend checking out arc and your listeners may like it as well .
It's an alternative web browser that's relatively new and I've switched over to it and most of the people that I tell about they love it and they switch to it .
One of the benefits of arc is it has this , among a lot of other things that are much better for productivity is they have this tool called boosts , and what these boosts are is it basically allows you to like , customize web pages and Zap different elements of it to remove them completely . So I'll give you an example .
You go to youtubecom in arc and you create you know , create a boost and you can go in and you can remove the Recommended video tabs . You can remove the suggestions , you can remove the comments . So , like the way that I have my YouTube setup , if I go to youtubecom , all I see is a bar at the top and nothing else .
I've removed all the other stuff and when I open up a video , I don't see the right-hand side Recommended section . I don't see the comment section below it . All it is is just the video and the description and the title bar and you can set this up with like all your sites .
So I have like a little bit of a Similar setup for like Twitter , but honestly , my biggest like social media hack is just logging out .
I think that's probably , probably the easiest one , but sometimes , like you , it sucks .
Sometimes you need these things for work .
Yeah , that's my preferred right . That's a shame ruin your Focus .
So I don't know they're . They're all workarounds . Unfortunately , these yeah tools are all designed to take your time and you got to just like decide when it's okay and when it's not 100% .
¶ Work Hacks to Reduce Work Hours
One thing that strikes me just by speaking to you is like you're super relaxed and If you speak really well , you really relax . I can see that , like you know , you have a good sense of like fulfillment and joy and you're . You put your work hard and what you do right and I . What I'd like to dig into is that , the hard work element .
So what I love from some of your content was hard work , equal success , and that's like a common light that people will tell is that how hard you work is successful . I'd love for you to explain the Lena Messi example , which I think is literally Incredible . That is one of the best things I've seen .
I know it wasn't from you directly , but when I went through a lot of your content I saw it . I was like that is literally incredible . Could you explain that ? Because that's amazing 100% , 100% .
Yeah , I think the the biggest misconception people have , and the reason that they have it is because of the world of the nine to five . In the nine to five world , it's really hard to divorce the amount of hours that you worked from . You know what you get , because if you're getting paid by the hour , that's the direct thing , right .
The longer you sit at your desk or the longer you sit behind the counter , the more money that you make , and For business owners it's completely different .
The amount of hours has nothing to do , very little to do with the amount of output that you get at the end of the day , for the quote that I use from this book called free time , and it's like when you're , when you have a small business , there's nowhere to hide . The work that you're doing has to work Towards the goal that you want .
It is not enough to just sit at your desk and work all day long . So I think the the Lena Messi example is so perfect and yeah , I didn't come up with this , but I do talk about this . If you go to my YouTube channel , I don't really have a lot of videos on there .
That's actually just a workshop recording that I put up , but you can look at the example . But basically so , lena Messi is arguably the best footballer , soccer player , in the world .
I'm not here to debate number one , number two , number three that is as , especially as an American well outside of my competence , but I will say that many people think he is the best football player in the world and what's interesting about him is that they did an analysis of how many miles players walk on the pitch , on the field , over the course of a game
, or they run , and how much time they spend actually sprinting and actually moving . And what they found was , compared to other players and other forwards even the some of the top tier ones Lena Messi barely moved .
He spent very little time actually running on the field and what he understood was he has some of the best game sense of Any any player in the world .
So his understanding of how people move and how to create space and where to position himself is Significantly more important than how much time you spend running back and forth on the field looking Like you're trying hard and looking like you're busy . So what they did when they kind of analyze all his games ?
But they realized , like he understands , that there are hot spots and their positions on the field , where you're supposed to be as the forward in order to create opportunities .
And Rather than running around , he spends most of his time focused on creating open space and positioning himself in these hot spots , and he'll just walk , and what you realize is that this dude is like barely moving compared to anyone else on the field , and yet he's the best player of all time , and the lesson that we can all learn from this is that what you
do is Much , much , much , much , much more important than how much you do . We love to signal to people that we're really busy and that we're doing a lot of stuff , but before you can even think about applying Duration and length and effort , you need to spend time thinking about how am I actually using my time ? And right ?
That goes Right back into what we were talking about at the very beginning . You know what is the most important thing that should be focusing on and , yeah , that's just such a perfect example and it really blows people's minds when they hear about it .
It's amazing because what's funny there is there are some my critics in the football
¶ Direction in Business
space . I would say , oh , he is lazy , like that's actually been some a statement that he doesn't get back , he's on a team player , he doesn't know all these different things .
And there's a parrot in a video whereby the the other , the other guy just runs past him with the ball right and you would have seen people arguments , but those people are not looking at the broader context . This dude is a killer . He's scoring what like 60 . What's his job ? Right , yeah , what is his job .
That is the perfect thing . And you ask yourself that about your business . What is my actual job as a business owner ? It's probably to make money and to improve my life . Those are , for most people , that's their top goals . Help people that can be another one , but for him his goal is to win games by scoring goals . And sure he didn't chase that ball back .
But if he chased the ball back , that could actually take him out of the position where he needs to be in order to do his actual job .
So I think that's the lesson there . It's amazing , man , it's amazing . I want to ask you about the Direction . So you'd admit it , you kind of made a reference towards it there , but direction is more important in speed . So Again , kind of going back to the beginning , like how do you determine that direction ? Like , where are you finding that ?
Because speed is , you know , more output , go at it 100% all the time , which I definitely fell into at times where you know a month of this work , I'm exhausted at the end of it .
But then now I kind of know that where it's more important to your point with the messy example is bringing in opportunity , spreading conversations , kicking off more conversations , bringing in more leads and closing more deals . That's generally what helps me the most right , helps business the most .
So how do you think about direction from that perspective , as someone who is like a business owner or looking to build our scale of business ?
I think , in terms , one of the things that I see people ignore more often than they should is the data that's right in front of them , and you know the example that you gave . You're talking about what works in your business .
One example that I have that I see a lot is people will have like I'll ask them so okay , where does most of your business come from ? Where do you find your best clients ?
And especially if they have a service business , more often than not they're like yeah , my best clients come from referrals from my best clients , and they're like 90 plus percent of the time it comes from referrals .
And then we look at what they're spending their time doing and they are tunneled in on a content strategy where their goal is to get clients via social media . And then I'll ask them how many clients did you get this year from social media ? And they're like two .
I'm like , okay , well , we have some pieces of data here and we're applying our effort towards the wrong thing . You know , imagine if you spent all that time towards creating a system for getting more referrals or for providing better customer service to your clients and you said fuck social media , like let's not even post on it at all .
I've built an entire business that most people would be very happy with without one social media post .
So the things that we think are required are not necessarily the things that move the needle in our business , and the mistake that we make is there are things that are providing the vast majority of the value , and some of the tasks that we do are worth a thousand times , you know , checking your email or something like that .
And yet we know it , but we don't say , hmm , maybe I should do a whole lot more of that and stop doing everything else , like , I mean , I'm guilty of this too .
You know , one of the things that I noticed myself doing with social media content , for instance , was like I would have a video , for instance , go viral and I would be like that was cool , hope that happens again , instead of being like what was it about that video that made that good ?
How can I create 10 more versions of that same video that I can post over the next 10 months that are basically the same thing , so that I can replicate that success and quadruple down on it . And so often we see success and we go hmm , that's cool , I hope that happens again .
So true and going with it , but it's so fucking true . It's like that is as you said . You can deconstruct that one thing and that could . That could build your entire business , right ? Is that ? One change ? Change your offer , as you mentioned earlier . But the strategy component is a big part of our business too . Right ? The strategy to consulting ?
That's a huge increase to LTV . If you were focusing mainly on that , which you obviously do , that creates a value . Or looking at the viral posts , looking at those different components . But we get caught up on other things and I wouldn't really ask you off that as like , why do we ? Because I definitely have those tendencies too right ? Is that ? Maybe like a ?
You know , it's obviously a bias and perspective , but it's like we are attaching our identity to previous activities that we thought were right at that moment , but they're obviously not effective .
So how do we ? Where are we learning ? That's a good question and I don't have a good answer and I know there probably is an answer out there for why we do it .
I've noticed the pattern because I see it a lot , especially with the people that like , take my course or that I've worked with , or just like other people in my network that I talked to about , you know , our businesses is that it happens really , really frequently . But like , why do we do that ? I don't know , I have no idea .
If I had an answer , I would tell you 100% .
It just seems like this stuff just repeats on loop right . History doesn't repeat , it rhymes , right . So I want to look into , just before we finish up on some of this , scientific evidence about like less work . So you mentioned a lot
¶ Structuring Your Day Effectively
about how you know diminishing margin returns in terms of productivity and we can definitely see that in 95 . So when I was working in finance , my God , like people would be at a desk like 16 , 18 hours a day . They would come in at 5am before the trading floor would open and there they are at 10 o'clock at night , like zombies , right , so literally zombies .
So can you kind of speak about how like that would work and how should we structure our days as a result ?
Yeah , totally so . Listen , the data is really really clear on how much deep work we can actually do in a day . And deep work is really focused , you know , strategic , 100% laser focused actions . So there's a great book I don't know if you've read it . It's called Deep Work . It's by Cal Newport .
He's written a bunch of really good books that have been super influential to me , but I really like deep work and he makes the argument in this book that , based on all the research , we're really only good for about four to five hours of highly focused deep work .
And the example that I always give people is think about if you were to sit down and write and you just had a blank page and you were like , how much work can I actually do before my brain breaks ? And you know , 99.9% of people , after four to five hours there's nothing left . You might sit there and stare at a blank , blank screen .
You might , you know , put out some terrible work . But all the great writers they were really only working for like three to five hours a day for the most part . Now there are other tasks that you can do that don't require as much of your brain that you could fill up your time with .
But for me , I found that what I talked about and you know I teach people this is I work the five hour day , which is four hours of deep work , one hour of admin , give or take . Sometimes I only do three hours of deep work .
You know , one hour of admin or 30 minutes of admin , it just depends on what I got going on and then I let it go , because most people , the way that they work is they work like you talked about in finance , right , they work until their battery is at zero and then they go home .
And what they don't realize is that we're humans , right , we need time to rest and recharge . We're biological entities , right , we're not robots , we're not machines . We're not , you know , cogs in a factory . And these people that work 18 hours , they come to work the next day and their work is dog shit because their brain is broken .
You know what I mean , and I saw the same example . You know , my wife worked in the legal profession and it was the exact same story . Everyone spent the entire day sitting at their desk pretending to work , working until midnight , and they didn't do anything . You know , they had the appearance of working .
I call it pretending to work , you know , and it's so , especially in an office setting there is you get the most points for just being there , you know , being a warm body , you know , and if you're like , oh yeah , you know , rich works until 8 pm every night , he's such a team player and he's really devoted to the cause , it doesn't matter if you spent , you
know , all day on Facebook . People just see that you're there and you're like , oh , they must be doing a lot of stuff . But the thing is , when you're self-employed , there's no one watching you except yourself .
You know , maybe you have a team , but if most people work remotely now , like when I Sit down to work , I Don't see anyone in here Like there is no one watching me except me . So there is no incentive to Pretend to work and to extend those hours .
So you want to spend the time doing the stuff that actually moves the needle and then Get out and recharge so that you can do really good work for the following day , as opposed to just draining the battery down to zero , not realizing that the following day you are going to feel the impact of that .
There's a time for , like , listen , I've done all nighters . I'm there is a time to hustle and there is a time to sprint , and sometimes it's like that , sometimes it's monk mode , you know what I mean , and you just got to go in . But that's not normal and that's not what the day-to-day Should be . So that's my thought process on it .
There's a ton of research behind how long we should be working , the most optimal way to work . Oh , I'll give you one , all right .
One other story that I think really hammers this home is there's this study about construction workers , and they basically compared two teams that were building similar buildings basically the exact same building , and they were trying to figure out , like , what the most efficient amount of hours to work was .
And this goes back to my point about working these long hours . So they had one crew of construction workers that worked a standard 40 hour week and then they had another crew that was working in overtime week .
So I think they were working somewhere between 50 and 60 hours a week , and what they found was the crew that worked overtime Took an extra month or two to finish the construction project .
They actually took them a longer to work and Finish the project than the people that were only working 40 hours a week on the building , and that tells you everything you need to know . You think you know oh well , if I have an extra 20 hours a week , think about how much more I could get done .
But you have to ask yourself what is the quality of the work that you're doing ? And so often , when we're like brain dead and burnt out and fried , we don't have the opportunity to make like really strategic moves and think about big picture stuff that could save you a ton of work .
You're well rested and you realize this thing that I'm doing , you know , for two hours a week I don't have to do at all , or I ?
don't delegate it to someone like that saves you a hundred hours a year to just not do it and 100% one once we're fried , like , all we can really do is just like what's on the to-do list , what's in the inbox , what's directly in front of us , and there's less of that strategic thinking 100% .
I was laughing about because I've hired like a freelancer who's those a lot of operations and I would enter business . I was going through a lot of stuff . And he looked at them , being like you could just do all of this that way and then you wouldn't have to do it at all .
And I was just like I was like , yeah , you're so fucking right , I was gonna waste it like so many months doing it this way . He's like , let's do it this way because it's fresh eyes , right , just coming into this with a new perspective . And I was just like , yeah , you're just , you're just so right , you know .
So understanding that before we finish up , I wanted to ask you just one thing that came into my head is that did you ever consider the impact of like diet and like calories , food , weight , productivity , deep work and stuff like this ? Because I think it's quite an interesting like you're very healthy dude . I can see you're very active .
Have you Exited , done any research into that element ?
Yeah , yeah , I mean , it's cool , I have like a whole . So if people always ask me and I think this was really sad , actually that people will be like so what do you do with all of your free time ? I'm like dude , I have a million activities and interests that I'm trying to do like I have no shortage , and if you need things to do , just let me know .
There's plenty of stuff you can do outside of work . But one of my hobbies outside of work is I am definitely interested in like health , you know Kind of like bio hacking , nutrition , exercise , all that stuff .
I've gone down the rabbit hole on a bunch of that and it's it's definitely an interest of mine , the number one hack that works for me that I can recommend and listen
¶ Why Is Nutrition Important?
. Everyone's different if you don't feel you got to test stuff , but for me I do not Eat until I'm done work basically . So I do my morning work routine .
On an average day I'll probably start around like wake up , meditate , get in front of the desk around 7 38 and you know I'll do my work session and then I will break that fast with my first meal of the day after I'm done with work . If I need to work longer than that . I try to stay away from carbs in the morning .
I find that , like with the mental clarity , it doesn't help . So I'm better off eating a you know kind of high protein , high fat Breakfast .
I'm not keto or anything like that , but for work and for focus and , like you know , removing brain fog and stuff like that , I find that I move much faster , either fasted or with you know high protein , high fat super interesting , man , because you know , of course you could be an inspection of nutty enough , and then you're going to be kind of groggy ,
irritated , and then there's too much on a spectrum , then we're by .
You're completely Overwhelmed by carbs , right ? because for me as yeah , for me as a bodybuilder , that's a , that's a Concern , right , because I might be eating too too low in calories , which means I can't really focus for too long .
And then , on the other spectrum , when I'm trying to put on some more size as Result as well , it's like it's very difficult to find that balance as a bodybuilder , right . It's like where is the optimal level of food , or just where isn't a decent level of food per concentration , because it's a bit different .
But that's very interesting though , because it's just , it's just completely nuanced , right . Depends on the individual , depends on their time . So rich , I want to say a massive , massive Thank you , man . I really , really mean it . I really do appreciate this . It's a fantastic session and , you know again , I think I can do for you in the future .
I would love to go deeper . There's actually multiple different areas I'd love to go into , even like on sleep , different areas on recovery as well . How are you doing this ? So you know again , my door is always open and if I can ever be of help for you , I'd like to say I'd love to help out sweet sounds like a plan man .
Great to have you you .