Systems and Tools for Stealing Back Hours of Productivity
Episode Stats
Summary
Nick Sonnenberg is the founder and CEO of Leverage, an efficiency consulting business, and the author of Come Up For Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. Today, on the show, Nick explains how people spend almost 60% of their time doing work about work, and why hiring more people can actually make the problem worse rather than better. He then shares his CPR business efficiency framework, and how making changes in how you communicate, plan and manage resources can open up hours of time.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Businesses and individuals often feel overwhelmed and stretched that they can't get done all the
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work they need to. The solution they frequently turn to is finding a new app to use or hiring
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more employees to spread the load. But my guests would say that you can steal back hours of
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productive time simply by using the tools and teams you have now if you learn to use them in
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a more efficient way. Nick Sonnenberg is the founder and CEO of Leverage, an efficiency
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consulting business and the author of Come Up for Air, how teams can leverage systems and
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tools to stop drowning in work. Today on the show, Nick explains how people spend almost
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60% of their time doing work about work and why hiring more people can actually make the
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problem worse rather than better. He then shares his CPR business efficiency framework and how
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making changes in how you communicate, plan and manage resources can open up hours of
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time. We talk about how to organize your communication channel so your workday isn't taken
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up by what Nick calls the scavenger hunt, one of the most underutilized tools for taming your
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inbox, how to stop wasting time on meetings, and tiny changes that will add up to many hours saved
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each year. Along the way, we talk about how some of these tactics can save you time in your
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personal life as well. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash air.
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Nick Sonnenberg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Brett.
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So you run an operational efficiency consultancy. Basically, your company helps other companies
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do their work more efficiently. So how did you get into operational efficiency consultancy?
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Good question. Well, my whole life, I've always been obsessed with time. You know, I think that time
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is our most scarce resource. And even as a kid, my mom would be telling me bedtime stories, and I would
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be sitting there and be like, okay, get to the end. So she was wearing red and got in by a wolf.
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So I've always been antsy with time. And in my prior life, I was a high frequency trader. And if you
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don't know what that is, I would build algorithms to code computers at super high frequencies, like
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we're looking at nanoseconds and microseconds. And I would trade billions and billions of dollars of
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stocks fully automated. And so in that space, literally a microsecond could mean millions.
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And that's where I developed this appreciation even further of the value of time and automation and
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process, all of those things. And when I got into startups, I applied the same type of thinking and
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passion for time in the startup life. And early days of leverage, my company, we were still in the
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time-saving space, but we were doing tasks and projects for people. So we were a freelancer marketplace.
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And I was always more interested though, in kind of the behind the scenes, like there's this
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explosion of new tools, there's Trello, there's Slack, there's Zapier, there's all these tools,
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but like, there's no playbook. Like, how do you tie all these things together to run a high
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performing team? So I was always really more interested with kind of how the sausage was
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made, so to speak, versus what the sausage was. And we grew very quickly. So my kind of short
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story here is, we grew to about seven figures in the first year, fully bootstrapped, about 150 people
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on the team. But we got ahead of our skis. And even though that's impressive, we were losing a ton
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of money. We were losing about half a million dollars a year in profit, three quarters of a
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million dollars in debt. And so even though we had some stuff figured out, we were missing a lot of
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other pieces. And one day, my business partner tapped me on the shoulder. We were having coffee,
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and he told me he was leaving. And he didn't give me two weeks or two days. He gave me two minutes
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notice. And I'm sitting there, I go white. I'm thinking, holy crap, we're going to go bankrupt.
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And even though we had a lot of things automated, he was the face of the company. No one knew who I was.
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And so when he left, we within literally a matter of three months, lose immediately 40% of revenue,
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profit, team members, clients, everything. It's like just verge of bankruptcy.
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And in this really stressful time, and I'm cashing out my 401ks, my dad's taking second mortgages on
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his house for our payroll. It was really hard to really fix the fundamental problems. Like it was
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obvious what some of the foundational issues were. But I was drowning so much in work that I didn't
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have more time to fix the things I needed to fix. So the biggest constraint, I think that we all face
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is time. If you had infinite time, you could build a trillion dollar company. But we're all constrained
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by 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so one day, I really just sat back and I did a time audit.
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And I'm like, where the hell am I wasting all this time? Because I need more time to make time. Just
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like it takes money to make money, it takes time to make time. And I realized that there were these
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three major buckets where there was a leak in the bucket. First was communication. And that was the
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biggest one. By the time I responded to all the Slack messages and emails, basically, the day was
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already shot. Like it was already eight hours in by the time I got through all that. Then the next
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bucket was planning. So I couldn't just click a button and know what did I need to do? What's my
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team doing? What did I ask someone to do that got done, didn't get done? So I knew that that was a huge
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bucket. And then lastly, what I call resources, I knew that it was important to document all of our
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processes, all of our SOPs, standard operating procedures. Like how do we actually operate? And
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I was already pretty good at that. Had I not have been doing that, we would have gone bankrupt.
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So long story short, I kind of realized I had this light bulb moment. Hey, there are these three
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buckets, communicate, plan, resource. And I started focusing on these and the company started turning
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around really quickly. And then people started reaching out, asking me to consult. So I didn't go to
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college thinking I'm going to be a consultant. I kind of fell into this space. And people like Tony
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Robbins, Poopery, the poop spray, Ethereum, a lot of interesting companies reached out to me to
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take a look at how they operated. And it turned out it didn't matter if it was one of the world's top
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coaches or a poop spray. Everyone had these three buckets. So ultimately, we decided to kind of pivot
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the company to focus on teaching people how to leverage all of these new systems and tools properly.
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Like no one's ever been taught the purpose of these tools. And so ultimately, that's how we
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landed in this space. And now that's what we do. And that's why I wrote a book about it.
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Yeah, these three tools, so communications, planning, and the resources, it reminds me of that idea that
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Cal Newport has in slow productivity of administrative overhead. It's the work you got to do to do the work.
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And I mean, I think a lot of companies and individuals, they probably know it's like most of my work I do
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every day. It's just work to actually do the work that makes us money.
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Yeah, actually. So Asana, one of the tools I talked about in the book, every year they come out with
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a report called the Anatomy of Work Index. And they call it work about work. And it turns out that
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58% of people's time is spent on work about work. So that's like duplicated work, unnecessary
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meetings, switching apps, lost information, just things that don't give you joy, or add to the bottom line.
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Yeah, you see this in your personal life, too. It's called life admin. It's the work you have to do to do the
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things that you do in your family, you know, kids doing sports, getting the house remodeled, taking care of
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building, like, it just sucks that that stuff like the paperwork, and that that's it sucks up so much of your
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time. And so what I hope we can do this conversation is talk about how this mental model you've
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developed, how it can apply to business, but also kind of look at how it can apply to our personal
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lives as well. So one thing that companies often do, when they feel like they're just treading water,
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they're just drowning in administrative overhead, all this, this work about work, is they like, well,
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here's a solution we can do, we can just bring in more people, because we have more people,
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we can get more done. But counterintuitively, bringing in more people just makes work more difficult
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and can just increase the feeling of treading water. So how does adding more people to a group
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Yeah, I mean, I advise adding people as a last resort, not a first resort. And so if we take a
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step back and think for a second, why do we hire people? No one wants more people, what people want
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is they want more capacity and capability. And the way that right now people default thinking that they
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need to do that is adding more bodies to the mix. But it's really the worst way to do it. Not only when
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you hire someone, you have to pay for the recruiting, the onboarding, the training costs, the salary, but
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every single person that you add to your team adds exponential complexity. It's a math equation, it's n
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times n minus one over two, if you, if you care to kind of know, it comes from networking. So if you are a
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five person team, it's five times four divided by two, there's 10 ways to connect. Now you go to a
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10 person team, it's 10 times nine over two, 45 ways to connect. Your 100 person team, 4,950 ways
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to connect. So it explodes exponentially. When I say networking, it's like, what's the value of a cell
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phone? If you're the only person that owns a cell phone, it's worth nothing because you have no one to
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talk to. But the value of the network of cell phones grows exponentially, the more cell phones and
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the more combinations of people you can call. But the other side of that is there's exponential
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complexity, there's more ways for information to get to get lost, forgotten slip through the cracks.
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So really, you want to keep your team as small as possible as long as possible. And what I advocate
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for is, why not just get an extra 20 to 40% out of everything you've got right now, and save all the
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fees and the headache of having a big team. I think also now, not only with the tools, but now with
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the explosion of AI with all of these tools, I think we're going to start seeing smaller and smaller
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teams being able to produce millions, if not billions of dollars with teams of five to 10.
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Yeah, we run a pretty lean ship here at AOM. It's just basically me and my wife. We have some
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contractors that do some stuff for us. And we've both been reluctant to bring more people on. People
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always like, oh, you should grow, you should expand. And it's just like, I don't know if I want to
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manage other people. Because I feel like I would be spending less time doing the creation stuff,
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which is what we enjoy, and more time just thinking about, okay, is this person doing the thing
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Totally. I mean, no one's going to do it better than you, right? So if you're 10 times faster
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than someone else, by the time you explain it in an hour meeting, it could have been done already,
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plus you're on to the next thing. So yeah, I think that people sometimes kind of flex on the
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size of their team. But I think that that's going to be kind of a flex of the past. You know, it's
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like impressive to hear that, oh, I run a thousand person team or a hundred person team, but I'm much
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more interested. What's the revenue per team member? What's the profit per team member? I think
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Okay. So as you add more people, it just increases the complexity of work because there's more potential
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connections where things can get lost. Another issue is related to the complexity factor. It's
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a source. The complexity factor causes this problem. And you see this in a lot of the companies you
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consult is the scavenger hunt. What's the scavenger hunt?
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I mean, the scavenger hunts when it takes longer to find what you're looking for than it should. And
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sometimes it even takes longer to find what you're looking for than it would have, you know,
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taken you just to get it done from scratch. You know, part of that 58% I mentioned before,
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part of that is a scavenger hunt. You know, did Brett email me or was that a text message or was
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that a Slack direct message or was that in a channel or was that in a sauna? You know, and you have to
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start looking in 10 different places to try to find this one thing. And I think that's one of the
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biggest issues that we face in business right now is this issue of a scavenger hunt. And no one likes
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it. It adds no value to the company. Not only does it waste time, but it drains your energy.
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So by the time you're done with the scavenger hunt, it's not like you're mentally in a great
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state to produce the best work. There's other research out there that I know IDC came out with
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a report that about 30% of the workday is spent searching for information. McKenzie's come out with
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some 20% of time is spent in tracking down internal communication and information. So it's a massive
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percentage of time, this whole scavenger hunt and searching. And the underlying principle of my book,
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if I had to summarize my book in kind of a sentence, I think that to be a high performing team or
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organization, you have to completely flip the strategy that you're using. So right now the
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strategy that everyone's using is you're optimizing to just send information fast. You're kind of being
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selfish in the sense that it's the end of the day and you just want to do what's easiest for
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yourself. I send Brett a text, I send Jessica an email, I send Caleb an Asana task. And there's
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no rhyme or reason. It's just maybe I preferred in the moment or I was in the tool. So it was just a
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little bit quicker for me. But you can imagine when everyone is using that as a strategy, which is
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basically no strategy, it's just whatever's fastest for themselves in the moment, it becomes really
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difficult to find whatever you're looking for. And if people were to pause and take an extra five
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seconds to just put things in the right drawer that it belongs, you're not anymore optimizing just to
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send information fast, you're now optimizing to find information fast. And that's really where you
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start seeing exponential time savings. And, you know, we're talking about personal life before,
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take your personal life. You know, if you wanted to just finish your laundry as fast as possible,
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you'd take it out of the dryer and you just throw it in one drawer and call it a day.
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But most people don't do that. Most people spend an extra minute or two and you separate your socks
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in one drawer, your underwear in another drawer. And we do this not because it's the fastest way to be
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done with laundry, but we know that tomorrow when we need to get an outfit together, it's much faster to
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find what we're looking for. And it's the same idea with business. You know, if you just on the front
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end, invest a little bit extra time on the back end, everyone saves. And, you know, the chest of
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drawers that we work with in business, you know, that we've got a drawer for internal communications,
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a drawer for external communications, another drawer for our SOPs, like there's all these drawers.
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And it's important that as a team, you're aligned on what are the drawers that we're playing with here?
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And when and how do we use each of these tools? And if you do that, and everyone makes a mutual
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commitment to invest a little bit of extra time to put things where it belongs, what goes around
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comes around. And that's, that's really where we start seeing really fast results of 10 to 20 hours a
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Okay, so the scavenger hunt occurs when people optimize for the speed of transfers, you just want to use
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whatever app that you like, that's the fastest use. If you like texting, you're going to text, if you like
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email, you're going to use email. The problem it causes, it causes people to have to think about
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Instead, we should be optimizing for the speed of retrieval of information. And you see this issue
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of the scavenger hunt in your personal life too. I was looking at the tech stack that I got to use
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to manage my kid's life. And it's getting out of control because like every little group they belong
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So they've got like, there's like the remind app for school. So like that's what the teachers use
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to, you know, tell what's going on. So you got to check that there's different apps for sports,
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like managing sports teams. And the problem is there's all sorts of different versions of these
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types of apps out there. And so like different teams will be using a different one. And then some
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teams might not use one of those apps. They might use group me. And then your church might have
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their own communications app. And then like using email. And so like a lot of my bandwidth is being
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sucked up by scavenger hunts. Like, okay, which app do I got to use to communicate this aspect of my
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child's life? And I'm just like, man, can just people just use email? Like just, just use email.
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That's all you need to use. It's, it's universal. We don't need these different communications apps.
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Okay. So let's talk about how we can start reducing some of this work about work.
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Talk about the communication part of your CPR framework. Let's talk about some ways that
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organizations can start communicating more efficiently.
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Yeah. So first of all, to reduce the scavenger hunt, as it relates to communication,
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I bucket in the book communication into three sub buckets. You have personal communication,
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you have internal communication with your team, and then you've got external communication. That's
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clients, vendors, partners. So what I advocate for is default to text being for personal,
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email being for the external, and things like Slack, Microsoft Teams being for your internal.
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And there's reasons for this. Each tool has functionality that's optimized for those use
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cases. But even if you don't use all of the features and automations and all those things,
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which you should, don't get me wrong, just separating into those buckets makes it already
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a lot easier to find what you're looking for. Because I know, hey, what did Jessica tell me?
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Okay, well, Jessica's on my team. So I'll look in the internal communication tool.
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Versus, hey, that could be an email, it could be a text, or it could be a Slack message.
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You see what I mean? So already, you're reducing kind of where you need to look by
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an order of magnitude. Then beyond that, obviously, you want to use each of these tools
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One of the most popular things we teach is inbox zero, which is essentially turning your email
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into an external to-do list that other people can add to. And we don't advocate zero being
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actually getting to zero, but less than 20, less than 30. You're just not wasting time
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So in the companies you consult and in your own company, email is only for external communication.
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How does using email only for external communication, not internal communication,
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So for one, at least you're creating that separation. But if you think about email,
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it's very basic. It's ordered chronologically, right? The most recent email is at the top of
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your inbox. For tools like Slack and Microsoft Team, it's not ordered chronologically, it's ordered
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by topic. You can have channels. So you could have a finance channel, a marketing channel,
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an HR channel. You can get as granular as you want. And that's where you can house these
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conversations. You can put third-party integrations into those channels. So I don't even need to leave
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Slack. If someone signs up, if someone books a call, the things that I care about, we have
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automated messages going to different channels. I turn off all the pop-ups so I'm not getting
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distracted. But I don't need to log into basically any tool. I get a message in the relevant channel
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in Slack for anything that I care about. Also, I just want to be clear. The rules or the framework
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that I lay out, it's not meant to be 100% rigid. There's always an exception to the rule. So if your
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office is on fire or getting robbed, go ahead and text someone or email someone. You know what I mean?
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I'm just trying to lay out the default behavior should be this. And then use your judgment if you
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need to go outside of what the normal framework is. You also provide some other advice on what
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you can do to tame the email monster. And one is to be more selective about sending emails in the
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first place. Maybe you don't send an email. Why is that? Well, there's a boomerang effect to emails.
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The more emails you send, the more you get back. And the best way to get to inbox zero is to get to
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email zero. So all the emails that should be with your team, move that to the internal
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communication tool, right? Because that tool is more optimized. It's not like you're moving
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crap from under one rug to moving it to under another rug. You're moving it to a place where
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it's going to be easier to retrieve in the future. So the best way is to just get to email zero.
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And like I said, the more you send, the more you get back. So just be mindful. Some people like to do
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send laters, you know? So if you're writing emails on the weekend, maybe you hit the send
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button, but there's a button where you could send later and you send it to hit their inbox on a
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Monday. That way you're not having to get into a back and forth on the weekend.
00:20:47.980
I mean, you also talk about when you're going through your emails, you know, you got to be
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ruthless. So you're going through your inbox, you have to figure out, okay, am I going to reply to
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this? Do I need to reply to this? And maybe you don't need to reply to it. It's just an
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informational email. You don't have to be like, thanks. You know, it's like, you don't need to do that.
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Yeah. I don't, I hate when people are like, in general, I don't do the whole thanks thing or
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like the okay. Like, you know, I don't, I don't feel like we need to be overly acknowledging,
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but the framework that we teach for inbox zero is called RAD, which stands for reply, archive,
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and defer. Every email that comes in, those are the only three things that you can do to that email.
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So if something requires a reply, I'll reply to it. Most people make the mistake though,
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of thinking that they need to really be deleting a lot of emails. And I'm here to
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tell you, you don't need to do that anymore. You have so much cloud storage up there in the cloud
00:21:36.900
that you're not going to run out of storage. So you don't have to delete anything. You can just
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archive the things that aren't important to you right now. That way it's still searchable.
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And then the defer part of RAD, that's snoozing. And it's built into Google. It's probably built into
00:21:52.240
Outlook if you have the right version. Otherwise you can install Boomerang. But snoozing is one of the
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most underutilized things in email where you can basically click a magic button and the email
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disappears from your inbox and then it reappears at some date in the future. It's a great way to just
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get things out of sight, out of mind, but to appear back at a specific strategic date in the future when
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you do want to revisit it. Like take today's recording. You sent out some information. I read it
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in the moment, but I wanted to reread it this morning. So I snoozed it and it wasn't sitting
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in my inbox for a couple of weeks. It just popped up this morning. So I was able to refresh myself.
00:22:30.460
Okay. So email for external communication only. So if you own a business, it's going to be like
00:22:34.820
clients, vendors, people like that. You don't want to use it for internal communication because you're
00:22:40.060
going to use, this is the second sub bucket, internal communication. You're going to use some sort of
00:22:45.000
chat app. It could be Slack. It could be Discord, something like that.
00:22:49.840
A big mistake that people make too, though, with those tools, like we have to define what is
00:22:54.660
communication. So for me, things like, hey, welcome Nick to the team or like congratulations on closing
00:23:02.980
that deal. Like that's communication. A lot of people, look, it's better to use a tool like Slack
00:23:09.080
or Microsoft Teams over email for internal, but there's a difference also between what to put in a work
00:23:14.920
management tool versus a communication tool. So if I wanted to say like, hey, edit this podcast by
00:23:21.960
Friday, technically I could do that in a lot of different ways, right? I could Slack you, I could
00:23:26.860
text you, I could email you. Those are all communication tools. Of those, if we're on the same
00:23:31.720
team, Slack would be the best or Microsoft Teams. But even better, I want to hold you accountable for
00:23:38.020
that task, right? A person is assigned to it. There's a specific due date. Something needs to get done
00:23:43.600
that we don't want to slip through the cracks. That's where a tool like Asana or Monday or ClickUp,
00:23:49.860
or I know you use Todoist, that's when you would want to use one of those types of tools.
00:23:55.180
So there's some nuances here, but you have to also keep in mind when to use communication tools versus
00:24:01.460
assigning tasks to people that you want to make sure happen. Because we've all been there where you
00:24:06.520
use a tool like a Slack or Microsoft Teams and you're high frequency delegating. And before you know it,
00:24:11.900
you've had 100 conversations for the day, you can't just click a button in one of those tools to know,
00:24:16.940
hey, in the end, what do I have to do today? That's the purpose of a work management tool. You're able to
00:24:22.080
click one button and know, what do I need to do? What did I delegate? What got done that I delegated?
00:24:27.900
What's the status of this project? So I wouldn't put anything into Slack or Microsoft Teams that I'm really
00:24:33.260
expecting to get done that I need to hold someone accountable to. That's where a work management
00:24:37.900
tool comes in. Okay. So what kind of stuff are you going to see in a Slack typically? So like the
00:24:43.220
work stuff is going to be in a work management. What kind of internal communication would you put
00:24:46.260
into a chat? Hey, what do you think of this new dashboard that we designed? Or happy work
00:24:51.740
anniversary Arno. Or those automations of, hey, we just got to sign up. Quick kind of chats. But if
00:25:00.840
anything is like follows the Madlib, hey, person's name, get this thing done by this date, if it kind
00:25:08.640
of follows that structure, more than likely it belongs in a work management tool, not in a
00:25:13.660
communications tool. Gotcha. Okay. So I like this, this rubric of, you know, splitting up external
00:25:18.840
communication and internal communication, because it'll just make things easier to find. So instead of
00:25:23.480
going to email to find internal communication, you're like, well, I'll just go to the chat. I'm not
00:25:29.280
going to go to email. You mentioned a third communication sub bucket is personal text.
00:25:33.940
That can get unwieldy though, too. Because I said, not only do you have your SMS text service,
00:25:38.940
you might be using GroupMe, you might be using Telegram, you might be using WhatsApp,
00:25:44.600
Facebook Messenger, Discord. I just remembered there's actually an app for this. Have you heard
00:25:49.860
of text.com? No. What does that do? No. So the text.com, it was automatic, like the company that
00:25:55.720
runs WordPress. They bought this company called text.com. It's a universal text messaging app.
00:26:02.680
So you can connect all your text services you use. So iMessenger, let's see what you got here. We got
00:26:07.580
iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, DMs, and it's all in like
00:26:16.340
Yeah. So check text.com. We'll put a link to that. They just need to connect those sports league
00:26:24.080
school management apps. That'd be awesome. Yeah. There was a few others that I tried
00:26:29.020
a long time ago. I can't remember the names that connected all of them. I wasn't super impressed.
00:26:34.580
You know, we used to use Intercom that connected a bunch of things together. And then there's Front
00:26:38.540
app that connects a bunch of things together. A little bit more on the work side, not the personal
00:26:43.160
side. Yeah. Yeah. This looks pretty cool. That must've been a really expensive URL for them to
00:26:47.540
buy. Oh yeah, for sure. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:26:57.040
And now back to the show. So let's talk about the planning part of CPR. So C is communications.
00:27:03.280
We talked about what you can do to make communications a bit more effective, reduce the scavenger hunt
00:27:07.180
planning. You mentioned meetings, $40 billion a year is wasted in meetings.
00:27:17.040
So when you think about what are all the inputs to the cost of a meeting, it's, well, how many
00:27:23.440
people are in the meeting? How long the meeting is? How frequent the meeting is? What's the
00:27:28.100
hourly rate of these people? So if you can reduce any of those, even by 10%, it starts adding
00:27:33.860
up, especially the bigger the team you are, or the bigger the company, the more savings there's
00:27:38.760
going to be. Oftentimes, man, I'm blanking. What's that law? Like you fill the time that
00:27:44.780
you're allocated, right? So usually an hour long meeting, if you reduce it to 45 minutes,
00:27:49.840
you're going to be able to get the same amount of stuff accomplished. Especially if you start
00:27:54.600
really mindfully auditing these meetings, what can we strip out and pre-record a loom or
00:28:00.640
Amazon has that famous, I think it's like a six page document that people have to pre-read
00:28:06.120
before the meeting. But what's the pre-work? Whether it's a document, whether it's a loom,
00:28:11.700
but prepare for that meeting. That meeting should also have an agenda. So most meetings,
00:28:17.240
I would say over 90% of meetings that we see our clients having, they don't have agendas.
00:28:21.880
You kind of just show up, you shoot the crap for a bit, and it's like, hey, what are we doing
00:28:26.680
here? So a meeting should have an agenda. It should be really clear, what do we need to
00:28:31.000
accomplish on this meeting? Why are we here? Because if you've got five people on a meeting
00:28:36.400
and their hourly rate is $100 an hour, it's a $500 meeting if it's an hour long meeting.
00:28:42.960
Some things that we do is every quarter, we just delete all the recurring meetings.
00:28:47.980
And then we just see what shows back up. Because oftentimes, you find that meetings are still
00:28:53.920
weekly just because that's how the person set it up two years ago. And so we're still doing weekly.
00:28:59.860
But oftentimes, a weekly meeting can move to bimonthly or monthly. So those are some really
00:29:07.900
quick wins that you can do. Also, the whole thing with an agenda, these things go all hand in hand.
00:29:14.240
This is a holistic framework. So the agenda also helps you reduce the communication noise that you
00:29:21.260
have. And what I mean by that is, let's say I have a question for you. Like, hey, Brett,
00:29:26.380
should we raise our prices by 10%? And that's a question that I put in Slack. Well, now I've
00:29:33.780
distracted you. And now we might be going on a back and forth for the next 30 minutes talking about
00:29:39.800
this. Versus you could have a policy in your company that if something's not urgent, and it
00:29:45.720
can wait till next week's meeting, stick it as a talking point in the meeting. So that agenda ends up
00:29:52.620
being a really good place for people to house things that otherwise they're going to be putting
00:29:56.580
in that communication tool and distracting colleagues in the moment. David Allen wrote a
00:30:01.820
great book called Getting Things Done. And one of the underlying principles in that book is that
00:30:07.540
your brain is for having ideas, not holding ideas. So if you don't give your team a place to brain dump
00:30:14.500
where they can trust that it's not going to get lost, that's where you start seeing all of these
00:30:20.460
texts and emails and Slack and Microsoft Teams messages because they want to get it out there.
00:30:25.640
They don't want to just be walking around holding on to this idea because it's hard to come up with
00:30:30.220
new ideas if you're hanging on to all this stuff that needs to be said or spoken about.
00:30:35.860
So giving someone a place where they can do a brain dump and they can trust that in the future,
00:30:40.340
it's going to get covered. It's not going to get lost. It's a great way to move on with your day
00:30:45.220
and not have the anxiety and not also distract your team. And it turns out that probably half
00:30:51.540
the things that you've added to the agenda just naturally fall off by the meeting anyway.
00:30:56.220
And kind of back to the parallel with personal life, it's like you wouldn't do your laundry every
00:31:01.940
time one pair of socks gets dirty. So you want to wait for the bin to get full and then do a load
00:31:08.140
of laundry. It's the same thing with talking points. Every time you have a talking point, if it's not
00:31:13.380
urgent, don't distract your colleague. Just add it to a place, like an agenda, and then batch cover
00:31:19.480
a bunch of it next time you meet. Okay. Yeah. I love that. So you have a nice flow chart here in
00:31:24.580
the book. The first question is, does this really need to be a meeting? No. Cancel the meeting. You
00:31:29.720
don't need to do that. And the other one I liked was to help make meetings more effective and efficient.
00:31:35.880
Avoid the report outs. I hate those where the meeting leader's like, all right, everyone go around,
00:31:40.760
give us a report. And you're like, this could have been an internal communication. Like we could all
00:31:44.880
just glance at it and see the status. We don't need to hear it. So use meetings just to hash out a
00:31:49.880
specific issue on an agenda. Yep. Yeah. And like I said, there's tools like Loom. You can watch it at
00:31:56.400
2x speed. Now AI is getting built into all of these things. So you'll be able to say like, give me the top
00:32:02.560
three talking points from Brett's Loom, you know, and be able to get 80% very quickly.
00:32:07.860
So another part of this planning aspect is using a work management tool to manage your work. So
00:32:15.520
instead of using email or chat to manage the workflow, what, you know, assigning tasks,
00:32:21.440
you recommend using a tool. What are some examples of these work management tools? And like, how would
00:32:25.660
you implement this into your system? Yeah. So we use Asana, but there's Monday, there's
00:32:31.840
ClickUp, there's a whole bunch of these tools, right? And there's a lot of personal preference,
00:32:36.240
but it answers the question, what do I need to do right now? What did I delegate that got done?
00:32:42.480
What's the status of this project? What's the status of the goals that we care about? So it's,
00:32:48.640
what's going on with all the actual work? And if you can't within two clicks, be able to answer some
00:32:54.480
basic questions like, what do I need to do today? What's the status of this project? What's the status
00:32:59.300
of this goal? If you can't in two clicks answer those questions, you probably have a huge opportunity
00:33:07.800
No, yeah, that makes sense. So instead of using email, like trying to look through the email chain
00:33:12.800
to figure out what am I supposed to do and who's doing what, you just have this system where, you
00:33:17.220
know, here are the tasks, you assign people to different tasks and the person can log in. It's like,
00:33:22.540
what do I got to do today? They got their to-do list right there in front of them.
00:33:25.880
Yeah. I mean, back to the scavenger hunt, you might have 27 emails talking about one project,
00:33:31.260
right? Then what happens when someone quits and now you have to hire a new person and get them
00:33:35.680
up to speed? What are you going to start doing? Like forwarding like hundreds of emails? Like
00:33:39.500
it's pure chaos when you're trying to manage your tasks and hacking essentially a communications tool
00:33:46.600
for a project management or work management tool. Like I really believe every tool has a specific
00:33:53.620
purpose. And what's happening right now is there's tool overload. You don't want to have a hundred
00:33:59.220
tools because that's inefficient, but you also don't want to take the extreme opposite end of the
00:34:05.440
spectrum too, and just try to get by on text and email. And that's, that's one of the most common
00:34:10.820
things that we see in business. Text and email is quick, kind of back to optimizing for speed of
00:34:17.180
transfer versus retrieval. It's quick, it's simple, it's just a couple of tools. And oftentimes people
00:34:24.300
will make the argument that that's more efficient than Slack and Asana and all these things. So
00:34:29.900
there's a happy balance. And I don't think companies need a hundred tools, but I,
00:34:34.200
I also don't think that it's right to hack email and text to do everything. It would be like me telling
00:34:40.500
you, Hey, your job is to chop trees and I'm not going to give you a chainsaw. You've got to do it
00:34:47.440
with a Swiss army knife because we only use one tool in the company. Yeah. And you know, you can
00:34:53.100
apply this idea of a work management tool to your personal life as well. Instead of managing the to
00:34:58.120
do's in your family via, you know, the text message with your, with your spouse, you can have a tool that
00:35:04.260
you could be Asana. It could be to do list where like, here are the things. And then you make
00:35:08.340
assignments and instead of having to go through those text chains to figure out what you're
00:35:12.640
supposed to do, you just look there, that dashboard and you're all set. So let's talk about the R in
00:35:17.620
CPR. That's resources. What do you mean by resources? That's all about documenting your knowledge. So
00:35:23.580
that's your SOPs, your processes. So anything, we're no longer in the days where you need that old school
00:35:32.220
employee handbook that tells you about health insurance, vacation days, processes, you know,
00:35:39.740
core values. Now there's digital tools. Like we use Coda, there's Notion, there's Confluence,
00:35:46.280
there's SharePoint. There's a bunch of these tools, but you want to have a digital repository where
00:35:52.180
people can log in and see in a clean way, all the most up-to-date information. And kind of again,
00:35:58.580
back to this holistic framework, this is also going to help reduce all of the conversations
00:36:04.800
and noise and the other tools because all the conversations about, hey, how do I onboard a new
00:36:09.600
team member? I forgot the process. People should be able to self-serve and look up for themselves
00:36:14.280
how to do something if you have an up-to-date wiki. So anything that answers the question, who, what,
00:36:21.680
when, where, why, that's what I would call things that go into a wiki or an SOP. Processes,
00:36:28.180
answer the question, how? So how do I onboard a new team member? How do I do payroll? That's a
00:36:33.380
sequence of steps that have to be done in a strategic order. But this is all intellectual
00:36:38.000
property, right? So you've spent money figuring something out and it behooves you to capture that
00:36:45.420
and store it somewhere so that if someone leaves, you're not having to reinvent the wheel. Not only
00:36:50.680
that, if you ever want to have an exit, your business is going to be worth more because you've
00:36:54.880
made it more turnkey. Does that make sense? That makes sense. And you can apply this idea of like
00:37:00.680
a resource bucket to your family life too, right? So something I've been doing the past few weeks is
00:37:07.020
developing. We had a podcast guest, he was a butler, and he had this idea that all butlers have a butler
00:37:12.280
book about the homes that they manage. Yeah. And it just lists out all the information, like who are the
00:37:17.980
service providers you need for air conditioning, electricity, plumbing, information about all the
00:37:23.840
appliances in the home, you know, serial numbers and who you're supposed to call and when does it
00:37:27.880
need to be maintained? And then you can also, so that's sort of that, that wiki style thing, right?
00:37:34.120
But then you can also develop a SOP, standard operating procedures, where it's like, here's how
00:37:38.640
you do specific things to run our household. And this could come in handy. It reminded me of this book
00:37:43.420
that was written in 1953. It was called Teach Your Wife to Be a Widow. Wow. And it was all about
00:37:50.460
like, okay, let's say you're married and you die. Would your wife be able to manage like the bank
00:37:56.400
account and the investments and all that stuff? Because maybe you did all that stuff. So you can
00:38:01.200
develop like, okay, here's all the information you need for estate planning. And you can develop a SOP,
00:38:07.260
standard operating procedures, like here's how you do this. So you could do that in your family life
00:38:12.060
too. Develop like a resource tool for your family in case you have to, you're not there.
00:38:16.480
Totally. Look, all of the things that I'm talking about, I know that it's more directly a business
00:38:21.280
book and applied to business, but all of this also ties into personal life. Like I know people that have
00:38:26.240
planned weddings in Asana. I believe in work-life integration, not balance. So I use Asana for all my
00:38:34.100
personal tasks. These tools are so powerful now. Like I built an algorithm for my fantasy football
00:38:39.740
draft in a Coda doc. So there's like a lot of things personally that you can do with these.
00:38:45.320
And then tying it back to email, we all have personal email addresses. So knowing how to get
00:38:50.700
to inbox zero is helpful, not just for your work email, but same principles apply to your personal
00:38:55.740
email. Okay. So when you're trying to make things more efficient to reduce the scavenger hunt,
00:39:01.820
think about your communications, use the tools that are designed for communication,
00:39:06.240
just for communication, use the tools that are designed for planning, just for planning,
00:39:09.960
and then use tools that are designed for resource management, just for that.
00:39:14.240
One thing I want to talk about too, is I think when a lot of times when managers or individuals think
00:39:17.400
about doing things more efficiently, they typically think about major wins, like game changing habits
00:39:22.560
or practices that can save them hours of time. And some of the tools and methods we talked about
00:39:27.180
today can do that. But you wrote this article for time magazine called saving seconds is better than
00:39:33.220
hours. And you see, if you think about just like little small things you can do, it really does
00:39:38.580
add up. So give us some examples that showcase the power of saving a second.
00:39:44.560
Yeah. I mean, like this one sounds super silly, but you ever see that video where like people are
00:39:51.020
bouncing a ball and you have to count the ball bounces and then a gorilla comes in the middle and
00:39:54.920
like pounds the chest and people just don't see the gorilla. It's the same thing with these like
00:40:00.100
one to 10 second wins. Like people just aren't looking for it. And oftentimes there might be
00:40:07.120
hundreds or thousands of one to 10 second time-saving wins that ultimately add up to millions and
00:40:16.080
millions of dollars, especially when you start thinking about this applied to the whole team.
00:40:20.960
So one silly one is when we teach inbox zero, say there's about a dozen tricks.
00:40:27.220
One is keyboard shortcuts and hitting the letter E, let's say to archive, instead of moving your
00:40:34.080
mouse to the archive button, it might get you two seconds. So it doesn't sound like a huge game
00:40:40.060
changer. But for easy math, let's say you get 60 emails a day. Well, that's two minutes a day,
00:40:47.220
five work days a week. That's 10 minutes a week. That's 40 minutes a month over the course of a year.
00:40:52.520
That's eight hours back a year just from the letter E for archive. Now, if you're a team of 10,
00:40:58.960
that's 80 man hours that you just got back, right? If the average hourly rate is say $50 an hour on
00:41:05.660
your team, that's $4,000 of productivity back that can be reinvested in better uses. Probably not going
00:41:12.460
to change the world for you. But if we found a thousand of those, one by one, it's slowly going
00:41:18.060
to start making a meaningful difference. So I really just think that every second counts.
00:41:23.800
And you really want to be thinking in not just macro, obviously, start with the lowest hanging
00:41:30.420
fruit. Usually teaching inbox zero is usually the lowest hanging fruit. There's probably some quick
00:41:36.260
two to 10 hour time savings that we've talked about throughout this conversation. But kind of once
00:41:42.360
you get past that, really start thinking, hey, I just saved a second, but that's going to add up
00:41:49.480
by the end of the year to $5,000 for me. I was just at a smoothie restaurant and this woman was peeling
00:41:56.840
bananas. And this trash can was on the other side of the counter. Every banana she peeled, she had to go
00:42:05.260
and walk five feet and throw the peel away. And she could have just moved the trash can over. And I was
00:42:10.200
just thinking to myself, man, that's like five seconds of banana. If she's doing 100 bananas a
00:42:16.000
day, that's like 500 seconds a day. When you start adding it up and you start thinking about
00:42:20.740
how many stores they have, those little things actually end up adding up to a meaningful
00:42:26.860
difference. So I think it's more of a mindset shift that people need to adopt.
00:42:30.960
Yeah, you need to adopt a Frederick Winslow Taylor mindset to your life. Taylorism, where that guy from
00:42:36.780
the 19th century would analyze how manual laborers did things and how to be more efficient. You can
00:42:42.060
do that with your digital work as well. When Katie, my wife, read your article about, okay, man, if you
00:42:48.600
just save a few seconds, it adds up in a year. She inspired her to reduce the number of tabs she keeps
00:42:55.160
open on her browser. Whenever I look at her browser, there's probably 20 tabs. And I'm like, how do you
00:43:00.540
find what you need? And she's like, I can't. I have to spend a couple seconds trying to figure out
00:43:04.900
which tab I'm in. And so she's reduced the number of tabs. It's like just three tabs and it saved her
00:43:11.300
some time. Another thing she did too, that she noticed that was sucking up a lot of time. It
00:43:15.740
wasn't, it wasn't much in the moment, but it adds up is she had her computer lock screen to come on
00:43:21.360
like after two minutes, if she hadn't been using it. And so every time she had to get back on her
00:43:25.300
computer, she had to like enter her password. And so she's taken that off because like she keeps the
00:43:29.900
computer in her home all the time. So it's not like anyone who shouldn't be on there is having
00:43:34.800
access to it. So that's another way you can save time. You have some other recommendations in this
00:43:38.720
article, use a password manager instead of trying to manually remember your passwords. I use LastPass
00:43:43.820
that saved me so much time. Yep. Yeah. Look like that. That's a great one. The screensaver. And the
00:43:49.460
thing with these things are, it's not like you have like a timer next to you. And like at the end of
00:43:53.720
the year, you're going to say like, Hey, congratulations in your bank account, you just got $3,700 back.
00:43:59.160
So that's the challenge with it. But you just really have to train yourself to be aware
00:44:03.220
something that she might like for the tabs. You know, some people like Google Groups,
00:44:07.060
I've been testing out a Chrome extension called Workona. What does that do?
00:44:11.460
It's just another tab management organization tool, but it's pretty cool. Check it out.
00:44:15.740
You can like, I have like a finance tab. So I click that and then all my finance tabs come up.
00:44:21.240
Oh, that's cool. Yeah. I mean, Google Groups is starting to get pretty good too.
00:44:25.080
Workona is just a little bit more robust, but Google Groups are free and fine.
00:44:29.940
Okay. So use shortcuts. Yeah. Shortcuts, email shortcuts or keyboard shortcuts,
00:44:35.120
reduce number of tabs, use these tab management apps, password manager. I mean, what's some other
00:44:39.800
stuff that I've noticed that sucks up a lot of my time?
00:44:42.100
Well, I think that another thing is like just stacking, you know, like if you are, I don't know,
00:44:49.040
I make a protein shake in the mornings. Like I might listen to a podcast while I'm doing that.
00:44:53.440
So I'm getting like kind of two things done at the same time. There's small ones like that.
00:44:58.040
Like if I can take a meeting instead of it being on my computer on Zoom, if I could take that on the
00:45:03.220
phone and now I can do it while I'm on a walk or a bike ride, getting vitamin D, getting some
00:45:11.240
So as much as I can stack and then also you should roughly have an idea of what the value of your time
00:45:16.880
is and any activity that you're doing that you don't like doing that you could hire someone at
00:45:23.120
a fraction of what your time is worth. You should just hire that person, right? So if you can hire
00:45:28.580
someone to help you clean the house and that's far cheaper than what your hourly rate is and you hate
00:45:34.780
cleaning the house, like that might be something you want to consider.
00:45:37.720
I spend a lot of money on Ubers, but I'm able to get a lot more work done when I'm in an Uber versus
00:45:43.660
say in the subway. So, you know, I'll spend the extra bit of money because the value of the extra
00:45:50.960
work I can produce while I'm in the Uber makes it worth that investment.
00:45:55.400
Something I've been experimenting more with is using Siri on my phone. I imagine it's only going to get
00:46:00.660
better with artificial intelligence where you can tell your phone or your device to do something
00:46:05.740
and they'll be able to do really complex tasks. So yeah, I've been using Siri to add things to my
00:46:12.400
to-do-ist when I'm on the go, like when driving, I have an idea. I'm like, all right, Siri, add this
00:46:17.760
to this project and to-do-ist. And I would say 90% of the time it works flawlessly, but then like the
00:46:25.520
other 10% of the time she's like, I didn't get that. And then I'm like, Siri, you're so stupid.
00:46:30.140
And she's like, don't talk to me like that. And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry, Siri. So I imagine the
00:46:35.300
voice stuff's only going to get better and then I'll just make you more efficient.
00:46:38.420
I mean, like ChatGPT now has great voice. AI meeting note takers have become really popular.
00:46:44.020
There's a bazillion of them now. We've been testing both Fathom and one called Circleback.
00:46:50.580
But, you know, something that you can do too is you could just start a meeting with yourself
00:46:55.120
and brain dump. And then these tools will summarize it and create the action items for you.
00:47:01.580
And these, yeah, I was thinking these tools can be useful if you're trying to create that resource,
00:47:05.680
like the standard operating procedures, because people think, well, I don't want to go through
00:47:09.480
all these tasks that I do and like write out a step one, you do this step two, you do this.
00:47:13.820
You could actually just do the thing and just talk about it while you're doing it. It's like
00:47:18.020
right now I'm doing this and use one of those AI apps to create a transcript for yourself.
00:47:23.860
Totally. I mean, there's tools like, I believe Tango, I haven't used it, but
00:47:27.140
it can record the screen of you doing something and then it can create the SOP for you.
00:47:32.420
I mean, we're living in such an interesting time. And what we're talking about today,
00:47:37.400
I think the principles are going to, they're going to hold the test of time. I think we're
00:47:41.700
always going to need those buckets, but the tools are going to change. AI is going to be able to do
00:47:46.880
more and more things. But if you want to take advantage of everything that AI can do for you,
00:47:52.900
AI is only going to be useful and as good as the data that it's going to be able to use
00:47:57.820
to perform that task. So it's really important that you have a strategy that is organizing data
00:48:03.900
and like this CPR framework will be helpful for that. Because if you want to start having
00:48:09.020
all these AI bots magically doing things, it's going to need to be able to reference
00:48:13.720
past information in a robust way to be able to do that task properly for you.
00:48:19.300
Well, Nick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:48:22.520
Yeah. So if you go to comeupforair.com forward slash AOM, that's where you can find the book.
00:48:29.440
And we have some special bonus resources for all your listeners. And then getleverage.com is the
00:48:35.500
operational efficiency training platform that we have.
00:48:38.460
Fantastic. Well, Nick Sonnenberg, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:48:42.960
My guest here was Nick Sonnenberg. He's the author of the book, Come Up For Air. It's available on
00:48:46.380
amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, comeupforair.com
00:48:50.560
slash AOM. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash air, where you can find links to
00:49:04.060
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:49:07.860
artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And while you're there, sign up for
00:49:11.440
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00:49:15.460
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00:49:26.120
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00:49:30.060
this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into