¶ Intro / Opening
I've always been obsessed with time and efficiency. I've always thought that time is the most scarce resource that we have, you can go bankrupt, and make back money. But if you waste your time, you're never getting that back. And my friend, David Allen wrote a book called Getting Things Done. And he has a great line, which is that your brain is for having ideas, not holding
ideas. And I think that's a key principle, as it relates to productivity and life more generally, that you need to have systems to be able to capture things so that you can have your brain be as light as possible. And when you're when you're an add person, you have this natural tendency to keep adding
more load to your brain. So you need to have systems to be able to kind of cleanse and get it out of your head so that you can free up space to actually do stuff with those ideas because the stress and cognitive overload that people face, it just becomes utter chaos. It's like a clown rodeo show going on in your head.
Welcome to successful with ADHD. I'm Brooke Shipman. Let's get started. Welcome back to successful with ADHD. today. I have Nicholas Sonnenberg, who also goes by NEC and he has a lot of titles. He is an entrepreneur. He is a columnist, I guess lecturer at Columbia University, and WSJ Best Selling Author of come up for air, you might have seen it. Tony Robbins, the Tony Robbins reviews it and has amazing
things to say about it. Nick is also the founder and CEO of leverage, which is a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement his cprw business efficiency framework definitely want to go into that. Nick, also has ADHD, and manages people with ADHD. So I want to talk more about that. He spent working for eight years as a high frequency trader on Wall Street. So yeah, I guarantee you, he has a lot to say about
that as well. And his CPR framework stands for communication, planning and resources. He has framework that consistently results in greater output, less stress, happier employees, and the potential to gain an extra full day per week, guys, you know, with ADHD, we are constantly battling the clock. So with time blindness and feeling like we can't ever accomplish our tasks. Nick is going to help us with that on
today's podcast. And he has worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries from high growth startups to the fortune 10. Welcome.
¶ Nick got into operational efficiency to manage his ADHD symptoms.
Thanks for having me, bro.
Thanks for being here. So Nick, we were talking for a little bit before the podcast, I asked if you had ADHD, you said that you think you do, you're prescribed Adderall. So that would mean that you do have ADHD. But the thing that so many people don't understand is that people with ADHD can be so successful. And they can also manage other people, which you do, and also your superpower from the little that I know about you. And hopefully you can tell me more on this call today is that you
can do operations. And so many individuals with ADHD have such a difficult time with operations as we have difficulty planning and organizing and prioritizing. So we usually get like a CEO or assistant to help us with that. So can you walk us through a little bit about how you help other businesses be more operationally efficient?
Yeah, sure. You know, I think ADHD, you know, I think it's a spectrum. I think I'm probably lower middle, like probably relatively lower on the spectrum. I haven't, you know, taken any Adderall for three years, actually, my past life, I was a high frequency trader, and I took Adderall for one year and it was the worst year that I had trading because I think it blocked I think it's, it's a really useful tool, especially
if you need it. It's definitely useful for me at least it stunted a lot of my kind of creativity. And so it was like really good if I needed to read a book, or sit down and just crush some work.
But what about writing your book?
No, I didn't you know, that's just good old coffee and other stimulants. Yeah. nootropics coffee. You know, for me, I find, you know, having a good morning routine and waking up early working out strong cup of coffee. Those are all kind of my equivalents of taking like a pill. And I've gotten into operational efficiency as a as a way to manage the add you know, I think add it's your your superpower is next to your kryptonite. I think in most cases, my friend Jen
hoody. I heard her say that once and it released back with me and I think having ADHD can be a superpower, but you just have to be aware of the limitations that comes with it and be able to manage it because people with ADHD, like some of the most successful people in the world,
¶ Capturing ideas is key so your brain stays light.
Richard Branson, yeah.
And you know, you're probably getting way more ideas than a normal person. And so I, I've become obsessed with operational efficiency, because I get so many ideas, and so many opportunities and all this stuff, and it can become overwhelming, if you don't have a way to manage it. And what I see a lot of people happen to a lot of people is, especially creative ADHD people, is, you know, they, they come up with millions of ideas, some of them are good, but it becomes
overwhelming for them. And then it becomes frustrating because they don't have the capacity or bandwidth or resources to actually execute on these things. And so, you know, I have an idea is worth nothing if you can't do something with it. 100%, I've always been obsessed with time and efficiency, I've always thought that time is the most scarce resource that we have, you can go bankrupt, and make back money. But you if you waste your time, you're never
getting that back. And I developed a lot of the principles and frameworks that I discuss in my book, and we help businesses with through my consulting company leverage, as a way to be able to capture and make sure that you fulfill on all those good ideas and you're able to not get stuck in them or
overwhelmed by them. But you're able to capture them and then move on and continue having creative ideas or working on high level things because the stress and cognitive overload that people face when they're, you know, having all these ideas, and then they're stressed out Wait, what was the last good idea I had? Or what was the next step without or did I follow up with this person, and it's like, it just becomes utter chaos. It's like a clown rodeo show
going on in your head. So my friend David Allen wrote a book called Getting Things Done. And he has a great line, which is that your brain is for having ideas, not holding ideas. And I think that's a key principle, as it relates to productivity and life more generally, that you need to have systems to be able to capture things so that you can have your brain be as light as possible. And when you're when you're an add person, you have this natural tendency to keep adding more load to your
brain. So you need to have systems to be able to kind of cleanse and get it out of your head so that you can free up space to actually do stuff with those ideas. Does that make
¶ Small wins like email shortcuts can add up to 8 hours/year!
sense?
100% 100% We have so much chaotic thinking, in our brain, our brains can be like ping pong balls. And if we don't get it out and onto paper, or share ideas, and then pick something to execute, or work on. We're just in constant chaos. So I 100% agree with what you're saying. And I know that you talk about like saving versus investing time. Talk to me a little bit more about that, and how it might go into getting a day back of your time.
Jay Abraham always talks about like running your business, like you're a hedge fund manager, and I happen to have been a high frequency trader on Wall Street for eight years. So I have an interesting perspective of financial markets and risk and reward and investing. And there's so much parallel between how you think about an investment in the stock market or trading. And with your time, it's, it's an asset just like, you know, stock is an asset or money physical cash is
an asset. And you can spend your time, well, let's take money, that's the let's start with money. You can spend your money on a good restaurant, you know, or, you know, a massage, right? That's, you know, spending money and hopefully you get pleasure from it. So sometimes you spend and you get joy from it, sometimes you spend it, it's a pure waste. Sometimes you invest money, though, so you take your money and you buy a house or you buy stocks or something where you're hoping or expecting to
get more money. You put something in now and you hope to get more later. And it's the same with time. You can spend your time with loved ones and get joy, right like you could spend it you know, at a Thanksgiving dinner, you can waste time you could literally like paint a wall and just like watch it dry and you know get no joy and no value
or being conversations with people where
you can invest your time. And that's like you could you know, rather than brute forcing how to onboard a client, you can take a step back, map it out, document the process, try to automate things with tools like Zapier and other things. Maybe integrate that with chat GPT to use a bit of AI to enhance kind of what needs to get done for that. And maybe it takes you five to 10 hours to set all that stuff up. But then you've like now automated it. And you never have to waste that
couple hours a week, right? So say if it takes you two hours a week, to do some process, but it takes you 10 hours of a time investment, to document and automate and like just get that into a well oiled machine, that now you don't have to spend that two hours anymore. That's that's an example of an investment equivalent to investing in the stock market or house right after week five, you've broken
even on that investment. And so I looked, I like to look at everything from this lens of how do you run your, your team or your business like a hedge fund manager? How do you look at time allocation? Like any other resource allocation, money or whatever? And how can we be looking at the risk and reward and the return on investment as it relates to operational
efficiency? So what can I do right now where it you know, me or my team spends a few hours to do something, but then maybe we save 10 minutes a week, right? And then after three months, you know, you're breaking even, I know, there's literally 1000s of things in your business right now, or personal life for that matter that you could be thinking about in this from this lens. Of course, you can't, you got to keep the lights on, you got to make payroll, you got to
make money. So like there's some things that like you can't always be doing, like long term, you know, stuff, but most people it's like 100%, short term zero thinking on this long term investing, you know, with a return on time concept. And so instead of just thinking all the time, like, how do I just make a
quick buck? How do you maybe allocate it to 5050 or 8020, short term to long term, whatever it is, but I want people to really be thinking about, you know, everything you say yes, to say you're, you're, you're saying no to an infinite number of other things. And so if I decide to manually onboard a client, that's fine, but just know that I'm making a decision not to spend a little bit more time to optimize or automate
that away, right. And I think people are just like lacking even that thinking or that awareness, which is the most important and we find it leverage when you start adding up all the ways and vantage points that you can optimize. People are wasting 20 to 40% of their week, like we're giving back like crazy amounts of time, like over a full business day, a week per employee, when you start and there's kind of three buckets that that I've laid out
in my book. And in our in my framework, the framework is called CPR, communicate, plan and resource. And those are the three buckets that if you start focusing on optimizing, you can really start seeing significant time savings. And it's not just you, what's most interesting to me is when you start extending these concepts to a whole team, it's one thing if you save 10 hours a week, but if you're a team of 10, each saving 10 hours a week, now the business is saving 100 hours a week, right?
And like, that's where it really becomes exciting.
¶ Improving efficiency takes allocating resources to it.
Absolutely. I think that many business owners have heard of the idea, right to delegate or automate or eliminate, but in actuality, having to figure out how to do that and stop yourself in your tracks when you are so in the
weeds. And most of us. And I love how you call it CPR, because you really are coming up for air at that point, once you're so in the weeds, you're over capacity with things that you're doing as an ADHD or as a high achiever, that you don't have the time to even take a step back and look at it without giving up some of the things you've already committed to. And you don't have the energy and the space because you're at 120% when you should be at 70% before
you delegate or automate. So what do you recommend to people reading your book or looking to gain back time when it comes to when they should start looking at things and how they do that?
I mean, you should start right now. And I would read my book because it really lays out kind of the principles of all this stuff. And he gives specific examples and ways of doing it. But a big a big thing too is to celebrate small wins. Oftentimes, you're so busy, you're just like want to move on and do something and you don't want to step back and even if it takes you five minutes to set something up, that's gonna save you two seconds every time it does it, you're not realizing kind of the
ripple effects of that. So celebrate small wins and the mental energy. Well like Take, for example, like the most, the most popular program we offer, it leverages our Foundations Program. And in that Foundations program, we do two big things. One, we teach the principles of efficiency. And two, we teach people how to use email properly, and we get them to
Inbox Zero. Part of that Inbox Zero training is, you know, rules and folders and inbox versus archive and thinking of your email as an external to do list that other people can add to. And at the end of it, we help you get to zero, and it's saving three, five hours a week. One of the tricks though, is using keyboard shortcuts. And
this sounds really silly. But you know, I think that conceptually, it's tied to everything we're talking about hitting a keyboard shortcut might save you two seconds per email. Now, if seems like nothing, most people would be like, adds two seconds, who cares? But think about this at scale. Think about everything at scale. That's another principle, right? So celebrate small wins, and think about impact at scale.
So a two second win whatever it is, whether it's a keyboard shortcut or anything, most people are doing this 60 times a day, at least on some people have way more. So 60 times a day times two seconds is two minutes a day, right? five business days a week, that means 10 minutes, per week, four weeks a month is 40 minutes a month, 12 months a year, it's like eight hours a year, right, just from a keyboard shortcut to hit the letter E to archive is eight
hours. Now if you're a team of 10, that previous example, that's 80 man hours per year, that as a business, you're getting back because of some silly trick, right? And we've got literally 1000s of these, right? So like, imagine, again, like 80 hours isn't going to make or break your business. But if I give you like 1000 of those, like that's going to start making like a pretty big
dent. Right? So 100%, but it starts with, with a mindset shift of looking at things through a micro lens, and celebrating small wins. Obviously, if things take you, you know, 100 hours to set up, and you're only going to save two seconds, kind of that time period where you kind of breakevens extended, but there's there's a lot of things where within an hour, you're already breaking even, right. And like if you start stacking those things up, it completely changes the trajectory of your business.
¶ Remember to celebrate small milestones.
Yeah, I think the concept of small wins is so helpful us as ADHD errs, or high achievers, we're constantly thinking about the gap versus the gain. And I like you just launched my book, and I'm like, Okay, what's next? How do we market it? How do we do this? How do we do that? Instead of just taking a step back, and like eating cookies and having a glass of wine and being like, Whoa, I just did have hard, big
thing, right? We are just, we need we need that reminder to be kind to ourselves, and recognize how far we've come and our milestones along the way. And I love the whole shortcuts for the emails as well. I'm not sure if you have used superhuman. Yeah,
a lot of people really love superhuman, you know, and I'm not using it right now. I just use Gmail and we have a framework for that. But you know, the principles apply whether you're using Outlook, Gmail, superhuman, there's a framework that we teach in our Foundations program called rad reply, archive, defer emails, as simple as that. Those are the only three things that you can
do with any email. And then, you know, there's, you know, a few tips and tricks that we teach, and you know, you're off to the races.
Yeah, I like the read. I have heard of cat before K T. Keep archive toss for physical stuff. So we're going to start thinking about rad.
Yeah, well, you need that defer that that defer is a pretty critical step with with all these things, right? Because there's so many times where something's not relevant now. But you want to be reminded, at some point in the future, and so you need to be able to snooze to snooze it. So it leaves it's out of sight out of mind. It's not cluttering your brain space, and it but you're you can rest assured that it's coming back, you know, in two weeks.
Yeah, I like that. So you obviously have cracked the code for productivity and saving time for people. I'm curious how you also implement this in your personal life.
You know, all the tools that I talked about in the book, I use a lot of them in my personal life. Take Take Asana, for example. That's a work management tool. We have a partnership with them. fent you know, you There's other there's others. There's Monday there's, there's a whole bunch of others. We really like Asana. But whether I have an idea for work and or an idea for personal or a task for personal, it all goes, it all funnels into asana and then I categorize it. And I have
like a personal project. But you know, I have the app on my phone, whether I have an idea for anything, it always goes into a sauna. And then from there, when I'm, when I have time, I then categorize it and clean it up. But that's kind of my brain dumping tool for any action items, I then we have a partnership with coda, which is a, like a wiki. And I talked about this in my book, too. That's where we store company knowledge. But I have a personal doc, which is kind of my second
brain so to speak, right? When it lays out, you know, for an EA, you know, what, what to do with my health insurance, or my travel preferences, or scheduling preferences and everything about me, and, you know, if I hire a new a new EA, I can just hand them over this document, and they know everything about about me. So, you know, there's a lot of these tools that crossover and have
strong compelling use cases. You know, regardless if it's for a business use case or personal use case, you know, emails and other thing like, we all use email for personal and for work. So most of these tools can really be useful in both contexts.
Yeah, so having the right tool, whether it be digital or paper, and relying on that, I think it's interesting that you brought up Asana because I plan my wedding on Asana, milestones, all of that. And your good friend, Tony Robbins says, whatever you focus on grows, right. So if it's not there, and you're not planning it, then you're not going to focus on it. Yeah.
Was it where we're focus goes, energy flows.
Yes, yes. Yes, that's it. Thank you. Thank you. So what would you say would be the number one success tip that you want to leave people with here today?
I think that, you know, back to what we've discussed already about core principles. But I really think your brain is for having ideas, not holding ideas is a key principle, celebrating small wins is another one. The key principle of my book, which is really the kind of what separates my content from other content is really what I've
discovered. And we've done this with 1000s of teams, what I've discovered is to be a high performing team, you need to change your strategy on what you're optimizing for most people are optimizing for speed of transferring, meaning like hair, Brooke, just take this and it's like hot potato. And you know, you have ADD, or even if you don't have ADD, it's just like, you're moving so fast. And they're like playing this game of hot potato. And so
you're just like, delegate it, you take it. Yeah,
and you don't care how you're giving someone something like it's a text, it's an email, it's a Slack message. It's an Asana, like, who the hell cares, I'm on our 14 of my day, I need to sign off soon, I'm dying. Right. And it's really difficult. You know, when you're stretched for time to take a step back and invest, not spend the time to put things
where it belongs, right. If you really want to have that exponential efficiency gain, as a, as a collective team, you need to change the strategy from being a bunch of individuals optimizing to transfer stuff as fast as possible. And without any rhyme or reason. You know, enter changeably, use text or email or slack or whatever you're using. And you want to align a team to take pause and optimize for retrieval of information rather than
transfer. And that means you take pause, and you invest the time to put things in the right drawer where it belongs. But if you do that, you avoid all of those situations where it takes you 10 times or 100 times longer to find what you're looking for. Right. So take your doing your laundry is a great example.
It's not little, the fastest way
to be done with your laundry would be you take it out of the dryer, and you just throw it in a drawer. And then you you know, you tick the box that you're done,
if it ever makes their exam or you throw it on your chair, and you just pull one piece at a time. So a
lot of you know that would be the fastest way to to be done right now today with your laundry, right? However, we all are, for the most part, most of us do realize that it's worth the investment to not do that and to separate your socks in one drawer and your underwear in another drawer. And even though that's not the fastest way to be done with laundry. We do that because tomorrow when you need to get an outfit together, it's much faster to retrieve what
you're looking for. It's the same concept Usually with work, you've got a drawer for internal communications and your for external communications and your, for your tasks for your projects for your SOPs for your processes. And if you don't stop and put things in the right drawer, you're kind of making a shortcut to save a few seconds now, but in a month, you're making life a lot harder for you and for your team. And so what
goes around comes around. And if, if you change your mindset, and optimize for retrieval, as a team, you'll you'll be saving tons of time.
¶ Improving ops efficiency needs to start from the top down.
I love that. Now, I think in all of these strategies are wonderful. And I'm sure you talk more about this in your book. But when you have that cognitive overload that you talked about, in the beginning, that so many individuals with ADHD have, and so many high achievers have people working on Wall Street traders, how do you even get to the point where you have the energy to do this?
Well, it needs to start from the top down. And as a company, if you're a business owner or Team Lead
listening right now. And you're you do any say gold setting frameworks like OKRs, or rocks or anything like that, I would encourage you to allocate some resources and some of those OKRs, or those key results to operational efficiency, right and make it a strategic initiative, it doesn't need to, you don't need to stop making revenue and put all of your eggs in the operational efficiency basket, but allocate some resources towards this stuff.
And maybe it's 20% of goals are around, you know, increasing operational efficiency and strengthening that foundation. But you know, it need, it needs
to be coming from the top. And if you're listening right now, if you're an entrepreneur, business owner, and you know, this is sounding good, then I would encourage you to your next goal planning meeting, wrap some tangible goals around this stuff, maybe it's, I want everyone to use email properly and get to inbox zero, or I want to rule out Microsoft Teams or
slack. And I want to do that properly with strategic channels and naming conventions and third party integrations, or, Hey, that Asana sounded neat, we have no work management tool, I have no idea what my team is working on, I have no idea what I've delegated. That's past due, I don't know the status of key projects, I don't know the status of goals, hey, that that's really important. Let's put a strategic initiative around rolling out Asana next
quarter, right? Whatever it is, I would encourage you to allocate resources, you know, another another thing is, don't try to bite off more than you can chew, you only get value out of these things if you properly roll them out. So we really encourage people, our clients, we we put people through a game plan where you know, you do one thing, first, you get the benefit, you save a few hours, and then you reinvest back to that investment versus spending.
Once we can save you a few hours a week, we reinvest that back into the next tool. So now we turn that three hours a week, say to five hours a week, and then we reinvest that five hours
into the next thing. And it's like this reinvestment, where at the end, you know, that initial few hours ends up being, you know, 10 to 20, hopefully, over a period of time, and you don't have to reinvest all of that back into operational efficiency, maybe half of it goes to operational efficiency and half of it allows you to close more deals or not have to work 100 hours a week, or whatever it is.
Yeah, you can't reinvest unless you have something to invest in. And if you don't have the energy, the time the resources to reinvest, start investing in yourself. So you can do that. Right. And I love how Sharon Lechter talks about your greatest asset, our assets. And I feel like it's a lines here, Nick, because you're saying, take what you have reinvest part of that into something else, instead of just saving and holding on, put it somewhere else where you can
grow. And for those people who are listening who don't know what rocks are, that is from EOS, their goals. So I hope we all took a look at our personal and professional goals because what you focus on grows. Exactly. Yeah. Well, Nick, thank you so much for being here today. And if people want to find you and get more information on operational efficiency, what's the best place for them to reach you
¶ Check out Nick's book "Come Up For Air" and GetLeverage.com.
two places one, check out my book, come up for air.com on that website, you can find links to get the book but also a whole bunch of additional resources. The book is like a 320 page book and I'm an efficiency nut. So you can imagine if I weren't it'd be like a 1400 page book. So throughout the book we we drop like URLs to get bonus resources. You know, if you want the quiz, you want the the blueprint for this. So that's all on that website. So if you get the book yet Have those
those resources. And then if you need further help, and you want to go through any of our training programs, whether it's inbox zero and the foundations or membership, where we teach all of the different tools that we lay out in the book, and what we talked about today that you can find that at get leverage.com
Wonderful. Well, it's a pleasure having you on successful with ADHD. And if you are a business owner, if you are a business person and you need more help with efficiency, definitely reach out to Nick, he's your guy, or at the very least, check out his book come up for air. Thanks for listening to this episode of successful with ADHD. I hope it helps you
on your journey. And if you need any additional support for you or a loved one with ADHD, feel free to reach out to us at coaching with brooke.com and all social media platforms at coaching with Brooke and remember, it's Brooke with any Thanks again for listening. See you next time.