A few weeks ago, I took my family on a vacation to Europe. We went to Spain, we went to Italy, we went to France, and this wasn't a, a work vacation. We actually do plenty of those. We travel quite a bit, and as long as I've got, you know, a laptop and a wifi, I am, I'm pretty solid. Like this was the gonna be an actual vacation, right? Because for the most part, I, I didn't know if I was gonna have connectivity. Um, a lot of the normal calls that I, I have.
On my calendar, I wouldn't be able to do because of the time zone difference. And our schedule was gonna be unpredictable, right? And I didn't want to be on a, on a set schedule, but I, I knew I'd have basically like an hour or two while I'm working out each day to find some wifi and plug into the business and get shit done.
So, you know, if you've, if you've been around me or my content long enough, you know what I, I love Tim Ferriss and I love the four hour work week, and I love lifestyle design. But if you actually look at my calendar. I, I suck at the four hour work week.
Like I, I put in a lot of work and I put in a lot of hours because, you know, I believe if you want to build something significant and meaningful and you want to compress the timeline in doing that, meaning you want to get there faster, like you're gonna have to work your ass off. Um, but what really surprised me about this vacation and this trip was that being forced, at least temporarily, like so, so being temporarily forced.
To work less made me a better CEO and the, the takeaway that I had was like, I created a constraint with this vacation that actually forced some clarity out for me because, you know, when you've only got one or two hours a day to work, your priorities get really clear, really fast. And like you, you get, you have to get laser focused on what do I have to get done right now? Like, I've got 90 minutes to do this. What do I need to get done?
And it, it's a forcing function to get the most important and to a degree urgent, but like the most important things to the top of the list. And I, there was no, you know, checking Slack for the hell of it. There was no, let me catch up on emails. There was no, let me look at, you know, some of the, the systems that we've got or the backend systems or you know, just checking tasks that you know, oh, you know what, I forgot about doing this. Like none of that stuff. I didn't have time for it.
Right. And, and so those things didn't get any of my attention. And what I, what I realized, especially coming back and, and sitting down, was I stopped reacting to the noise within the business and I started filtering for signal. I. Right, like I forced, or I was forced to, to only look at what was actually going to move the business forward.
Like what are the critical issues, the essential things that need to get focused today and or need to get focused on today and not what's gonna make me feel productive, right? So like there's, I mean, if you're a business owner, you know this, you can get to the end of the day, you can put in 10, 12 hours and you can feel hyper. Productive in the sense that you put in a lot of hours, but you still look back and you're like, did I really move the needle forward?
And this is a really good way of identifying the things that have to get done. The high leverage, high impact activities. And it wasn't, it wasn't the result of some productivity hack, right? Like it wasn't the, the result of some calendar trick that I learned, like it was just forced on me. It was survival and the impact was. It really shaped or reinforced, I would say the, the way that I think about time and leadership and leverage, right?
Because the lessons that I'm, that I'm sharing here, they weren't completely new, right? Like this, but it was, it was refreshed, it was reinforced. And you know, there's a, there's something called Parkinson's Law, right? Which is, um, you know, that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. So if I give a, a presentation. 16 hours on my calendar to get done. Chances are it's gonna take 16 hours. Right.
Whereas if I say you only have 90 minutes and, and you have a constraint, that actually forces the fact that you only have 90 minutes. You can get that presentation done in 90 minutes and you will hit the essentials. And this is.
It's kinda like in, in school, you know, when you cram, you know, like you, if you, if you start studying, at least for myself, if I start studying weeks in advance, you know, I've done this before where I start studying and then, you know, it takes me three weeks to basically learn the same thing that I could learn in, you know, eight hours the day before. Right? So, so Parkinson's law says work is going to take as much space on your calendar as you allow it.
And this trip with my family because of. Lack of connectivity because of lack of bandwidth and time and wanting to just focus on, you know, hanging out with the family and spending time and experiencing like where we were. Like it forced me to flip Parkinson's law on its head, right? Like it was, it's the opposite. So we compressed the schedule down to, you know, one, two hours and that's all I had, right? So everything got contracted and it got sharper. You know, there was, there was no fluff.
There was no filler. It was, there was only enough time to focus on high leverage execution. Right. And so that was one takeaway. The other thing that I, as I, as I was thinking about this, was the, as as your time strengths, as, as you know, as the, the, the, your calendar contracts, so does your grip on the business. And what I mean is the more time that I have. The more I tend to clinging to tasks that I could delegate. Right. Whereas being on this trip, you know, I didn't have any choice.
Like I, I had to let certain things go and I had to look to my team and say, well, shit, like I've, all I have is time to give you direction on what I need to get done. And all I have is time to coach and, and give you some feedback or review what you're, what you're sending me instead of controlling it instead of doing it myself. And that was actually a really good. Um, experience for my team, right? Because I, I, I was forced to push things to them, to empower them to do things.
And the result was they made decisions on their own. They executed without me being the bottleneck. They gained confidence because they were like, Hey, I've gotta get this done my way. Ray is not gonna be able to look at this before I send it. So, you know, they gained confidence. And then as a result, so did I. And I guess it, as it turns out, your level of micromanagement is often in, in direct proportion.
It's, it's, there's a directly correlated to how much time you have to micromanage, right? So you take Parkinson's law, which is like work will expand to the time that you give it. If you track it and you can press the calendar, well then what are the things that tend to get tossed out? Well, one of 'em is micromanagement, and I'm, I'm not by default like a, a micromanager. But it, there were a lot of things that I typically would've either done myself.
Or had more direct, like, Hey, do it this way. You know, like step one, step two, step three, and record a long loom video with very detailed, you know, instructions. Because I'm, I'm thinking that I'm giving direction and I, I'm thinking that I'm giving coaching, but what I'm really doing is I'm taking some of the decision making away and some of the empowerment away from people on the team. When you don't have the time to do it, you don't have the time to do it.
You say, this is what the finish line looks like, and then they go do it. Right? So that was, um. That was a, uh, a big, a big lesson for me. So, you know, they, all of this comes back. So I've, you know, I, I spend, you know, a little more than a, a couple of weeks, you know, getting really focused on. What these high leverage, high impact activities are, and then come back home and, and here's the cool part is now that I'm back home and my calendar is, is full again, right?
Like, now that I have the space, I like, I've got, you know, eight, 10, if I need it 12 hours a day to, to do what I need to, to move the business forward. The, the thing is, I've kept that filter, right? I've, I've kept the filter of. Hey, let's, let's not start doing all the stuff that I just didn't do for, for over a couple of weeks. Why don't I look at, now that I've got, you know, six to eight more hours to, to focus, what are the other high leverage, high impact things that I can do?
Right? So I've added it back with more firepower, I would say, and the. Uh, the clarity on what really moves the business forward is, is really powerful and, and now I can use the entire workday to double down on the biggest, most important things that I should be doing, not necessarily that I'm holding that I shouldn't. Right? So like the, the two hour constraint changed.
Not just like how I was working for a period of time, but it changed how I was, how I thought about some of the work that I've been doing. And it's really been like a, a turbocharger for, for me. And, you know, it would, so I mean, my advice is like, if, if I wanted to make this actionable, it's like, hey, can you do a two hour experiment? Right? Like, if you only had two hours a day to work, what would you stop doing?
And I know, like I've, I actually have a friend of mine that, you know, has said, Hey, pretend it's four hour work week that you've, you've only got X amount of times. And it's, it's so much more difficult until you're really forced to do it. Um, but if you can create that environment where you've really gotta think about, if I only had two hours, like what would I stop doing right now and what would I double down on?
Right, more and or more importantly, if I only had two hours, what would really break in the business and what would actually thrive in the business? And, and the answers might point you to where you're potentially over involved as a, as a business owner, as a CEO, uh, where you're under leveraged, um, or where you're holding onto stuff that you know, really don't belong to. You don't belong to you because. One, somebody else could do it. Two, somebody else could potentially do it better.
And three, somebody else doing it frees up your time to do stuff that you're uniquely qualified to do, right? So, you know, you don't, you don't have to fly across the, you know, the world to, to run this experiment. Uh, but if you can compress your calendar for a few days and, and take a step back and narrow your, your window and narrow your focus and see what surfaces, um, it's, you know, it may be.
I think a really good way to, to filter what's truly important and what's needed to actually move forward and, um, and move the business forward frankly. So, um, that's one of my lessons or a couple of my lessons from that, from that trip that I just wanted to, to pass on to you. And I, I hope it helps, and this is probably something that I'll revisit because it's easy to drift back into homeostasis.
You know, if you've been like in a, in a certain, uh, routine or a certain type of focus for a period of time, you know, a couple weeks is like a good jolt. But it's easy to, to drift back. So this is as much for, for me as it is for, for you, and um, I hope it helps Adios.