The Art of Manliness - Systems and Tools for Stealing Back Hours of Productivity

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.540 Businesses and individuals often feel overwhelmed and stretched that they can't get done all the

00:00:15.680 work they need to. The solution they frequently turn to is finding a new app to use or hiring

00:00:20.080 more employees to spread the load. But my guests would say that you can steal back hours of

00:00:23.960 productive time simply by using the tools and teams you have now if you learn to use them in

00:00:27.880 a more efficient way. Nick Sonnenberg is the founder and CEO of Leverage, an efficiency

00:00:32.400 consulting business and the author of Come Up for Air, how teams can leverage systems and

00:00:36.740 tools to stop drowning in work. Today on the show, Nick explains how people spend almost

00:00:40.900 60% of their time doing work about work and why hiring more people can actually make the

00:00:45.060 problem worse rather than better. He then shares his CPR business efficiency framework and how

00:00:49.780 making changes in how you communicate, plan and manage resources can open up hours of

00:00:54.060 time. We talk about how to organize your communication channel so your workday isn't taken

00:00:57.740 up by what Nick calls the scavenger hunt, one of the most underutilized tools for taming your

00:01:02.000 inbox, how to stop wasting time on meetings, and tiny changes that will add up to many hours saved

00:01:07.280 each year. Along the way, we talk about how some of these tactics can save you time in your

00:01:11.440 personal life as well. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash air.

00:01:27.740 Nick Sonnenberg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Brett.

00:01:34.720 So you run an operational efficiency consultancy. Basically, your company helps other companies

00:01:41.480 do their work more efficiently. So how did you get into operational efficiency consultancy?

00:01:48.480 Good question. Well, my whole life, I've always been obsessed with time. You know, I think that time

00:01:53.520 is our most scarce resource. And even as a kid, my mom would be telling me bedtime stories, and I would

00:01:58.900 be sitting there and be like, okay, get to the end. So she was wearing red and got in by a wolf. 0.82

00:02:04.580 So I've always been antsy with time. And in my prior life, I was a high frequency trader. And if you

00:02:09.860 don't know what that is, I would build algorithms to code computers at super high frequencies, like

00:02:14.440 we're looking at nanoseconds and microseconds. And I would trade billions and billions of dollars of

00:02:19.020 stocks fully automated. And so in that space, literally a microsecond could mean millions.

00:02:24.700 And that's where I developed this appreciation even further of the value of time and automation and

00:02:29.960 process, all of those things. And when I got into startups, I applied the same type of thinking and

00:02:36.780 passion for time in the startup life. And early days of leverage, my company, we were still in the

00:02:43.560 time-saving space, but we were doing tasks and projects for people. So we were a freelancer marketplace.

00:02:47.960 And I was always more interested though, in kind of the behind the scenes, like there's this

00:02:53.760 explosion of new tools, there's Trello, there's Slack, there's Zapier, there's all these tools,

00:02:57.740 but like, there's no playbook. Like, how do you tie all these things together to run a high

00:03:02.220 performing team? So I was always really more interested with kind of how the sausage was

00:03:06.560 made, so to speak, versus what the sausage was. And we grew very quickly. So my kind of short

00:03:12.900 story here is, we grew to about seven figures in the first year, fully bootstrapped, about 150 people

00:03:19.820 on the team. But we got ahead of our skis. And even though that's impressive, we were losing a ton

00:03:25.940 of money. We were losing about half a million dollars a year in profit, three quarters of a

00:03:30.140 million dollars in debt. And so even though we had some stuff figured out, we were missing a lot of

00:03:35.320 other pieces. And one day, my business partner tapped me on the shoulder. We were having coffee,

00:03:39.400 and he told me he was leaving. And he didn't give me two weeks or two days. He gave me two minutes

00:03:44.200 notice. And I'm sitting there, I go white. I'm thinking, holy crap, we're going to go bankrupt.

00:03:50.220 And even though we had a lot of things automated, he was the face of the company. No one knew who I was. 0.91

00:03:56.220 And so when he left, we within literally a matter of three months, lose immediately 40% of revenue,

00:04:01.760 profit, team members, clients, everything. It's like just verge of bankruptcy.

00:04:05.620 And in this really stressful time, and I'm cashing out my 401ks, my dad's taking second mortgages on

00:04:13.040 his house for our payroll. It was really hard to really fix the fundamental problems. Like it was

00:04:18.620 obvious what some of the foundational issues were. But I was drowning so much in work that I didn't

00:04:25.880 have more time to fix the things I needed to fix. So the biggest constraint, I think that we all face

00:04:32.040 is time. If you had infinite time, you could build a trillion dollar company. But we're all constrained

00:04:38.460 by 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so one day, I really just sat back and I did a time audit.

00:04:44.660 And I'm like, where the hell am I wasting all this time? Because I need more time to make time. Just

00:04:49.720 like it takes money to make money, it takes time to make time. And I realized that there were these

00:04:55.300 three major buckets where there was a leak in the bucket. First was communication. And that was the

00:05:00.880 biggest one. By the time I responded to all the Slack messages and emails, basically, the day was

00:05:06.160 already shot. Like it was already eight hours in by the time I got through all that. Then the next

00:05:11.460 bucket was planning. So I couldn't just click a button and know what did I need to do? What's my

00:05:16.380 team doing? What did I ask someone to do that got done, didn't get done? So I knew that that was a huge

00:05:22.140 bucket. And then lastly, what I call resources, I knew that it was important to document all of our

00:05:27.280 processes, all of our SOPs, standard operating procedures. Like how do we actually operate? And

00:05:32.600 I was already pretty good at that. Had I not have been doing that, we would have gone bankrupt.

00:05:37.480 So long story short, I kind of realized I had this light bulb moment. Hey, there are these three

00:05:42.520 buckets, communicate, plan, resource. And I started focusing on these and the company started turning

00:05:47.600 around really quickly. And then people started reaching out, asking me to consult. So I didn't go to

00:05:53.220 college thinking I'm going to be a consultant. I kind of fell into this space. And people like Tony

00:05:57.700 Robbins, Poopery, the poop spray, Ethereum, a lot of interesting companies reached out to me to

00:06:03.260 take a look at how they operated. And it turned out it didn't matter if it was one of the world's top

00:06:09.080 coaches or a poop spray. Everyone had these three buckets. So ultimately, we decided to kind of pivot

00:06:14.360 the company to focus on teaching people how to leverage all of these new systems and tools properly.

00:06:20.960 Like no one's ever been taught the purpose of these tools. And so ultimately, that's how we

00:06:25.040 landed in this space. And now that's what we do. And that's why I wrote a book about it.

00:06:29.040 Yeah, these three tools, so communications, planning, and the resources, it reminds me of that idea that

00:06:35.320 Cal Newport has in slow productivity of administrative overhead. It's the work you got to do to do the work.

00:06:42.060 And I mean, I think a lot of companies and individuals, they probably know it's like most of my work I do

00:06:47.340 every day. It's just work to actually do the work that makes us money.

00:06:52.300 Yeah, actually. So Asana, one of the tools I talked about in the book, every year they come out with

00:06:57.380 a report called the Anatomy of Work Index. And they call it work about work. And it turns out that

00:07:05.200 58% of people's time is spent on work about work. So that's like duplicated work, unnecessary

00:07:11.060 meetings, switching apps, lost information, just things that don't give you joy, or add to the bottom line.

00:07:18.780 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

00:07:24.440 things that you do in your family, you know, kids doing sports, getting the house remodeled, taking care of

00:07:30.220 building, like, it just sucks that that stuff like the paperwork, and that that's it sucks up so much of your

00:07:35.120 time. And so what I hope we can do this conversation is talk about how this mental model you've

00:07:39.900 developed, how it can apply to business, but also kind of look at how it can apply to our personal

00:07:44.160 lives as well. So one thing that companies often do, when they feel like they're just treading water,

00:07:51.540 they're just drowning in administrative overhead, all this, this work about work, is they like, well,

00:07:57.620 here's a solution we can do, we can just bring in more people, because we have more people,

00:08:01.640 we can get more done. But counterintuitively, bringing in more people just makes work more difficult

00:08:08.960 and can just increase the feeling of treading water. So how does adding more people to a group

00:08:13.780 make work harder?

00:08:15.780 Yeah, I mean, I advise adding people as a last resort, not a first resort. And so if we take a

00:08:22.320 step back and think for a second, why do we hire people? No one wants more people, what people want

00:08:27.620 is they want more capacity and capability. And the way that right now people default thinking that they

00:08:34.680 need to do that is adding more bodies to the mix. But it's really the worst way to do it. Not only when

00:08:40.220 you hire someone, you have to pay for the recruiting, the onboarding, the training costs, the salary, but

00:08:46.000 every single person that you add to your team adds exponential complexity. It's a math equation, it's n

00:08:52.520 times n minus one over two, if you, if you care to kind of know, it comes from networking. So if you are a

00:08:59.260 five person team, it's five times four divided by two, there's 10 ways to connect. Now you go to a

00:09:05.080 10 person team, it's 10 times nine over two, 45 ways to connect. Your 100 person team, 4,950 ways

00:09:13.080 to connect. So it explodes exponentially. When I say networking, it's like, what's the value of a cell

00:09:18.740 phone? If you're the only person that owns a cell phone, it's worth nothing because you have no one to

00:09:22.640 talk to. But the value of the network of cell phones grows exponentially, the more cell phones and

00:09:27.260 the more combinations of people you can call. But the other side of that is there's exponential

00:09:32.920 complexity, there's more ways for information to get to get lost, forgotten slip through the cracks.

00:09:39.180 So really, you want to keep your team as small as possible as long as possible. And what I advocate

00:09:44.980 for is, why not just get an extra 20 to 40% out of everything you've got right now, and save all the

00:09:53.320 fees and the headache of having a big team. I think also now, not only with the tools, but now with

00:09:58.580 the explosion of AI with all of these tools, I think we're going to start seeing smaller and smaller

00:10:04.260 teams being able to produce millions, if not billions of dollars with teams of five to 10.

00:10:10.980 Yeah, we run a pretty lean ship here at AOM. It's just basically me and my wife. We have some

00:10:16.980 contractors that do some stuff for us. And we've both been reluctant to bring more people on. People

00:10:22.260 always like, oh, you should grow, you should expand. And it's just like, I don't know if I want to

00:10:26.060 manage other people. Because I feel like I would be spending less time doing the creation stuff,

00:10:31.740 which is what we enjoy, and more time just thinking about, okay, is this person doing the thing

00:10:36.740 that I asked them to do?

00:10:39.100 Totally. I mean, no one's going to do it better than you, right? So if you're 10 times faster

00:10:43.460 than someone else, by the time you explain it in an hour meeting, it could have been done already,

00:10:48.480 plus you're on to the next thing. So yeah, I think that people sometimes kind of flex on the

00:10:55.760 size of their team. But I think that that's going to be kind of a flex of the past. You know, it's

00:10:59.960 like impressive to hear that, oh, I run a thousand person team or a hundred person team, but I'm much

00:11:04.340 more interested. What's the revenue per team member? What's the profit per team member? I think

00:11:09.400 that that's a much more impressive metric.

00:11:11.660 Okay. So as you add more people, it just increases the complexity of work because there's more potential

00:11:16.180 connections where things can get lost. Another issue is related to the complexity factor. It's

00:11:21.960 a source. The complexity factor causes this problem. And you see this in a lot of the companies you

00:11:27.900 consult is the scavenger hunt. What's the scavenger hunt?

00:11:32.760 I mean, the scavenger hunts when it takes longer to find what you're looking for than it should. And

00:11:38.420 sometimes it even takes longer to find what you're looking for than it would have, you know,

00:11:42.160 taken you just to get it done from scratch. You know, part of that 58% I mentioned before,

00:11:48.360 part of that is a scavenger hunt. You know, did Brett email me or was that a text message or was

00:11:52.880 that a Slack direct message or was that in a channel or was that in a sauna? You know, and you have to

00:11:57.980 start looking in 10 different places to try to find this one thing. And I think that's one of the

00:12:02.980 biggest issues that we face in business right now is this issue of a scavenger hunt. And no one likes

00:12:09.220 it. It adds no value to the company. Not only does it waste time, but it drains your energy.

00:12:14.240 So by the time you're done with the scavenger hunt, it's not like you're mentally in a great

00:12:18.480 state to produce the best work. There's other research out there that I know IDC came out with

00:12:24.100 a report that about 30% of the workday is spent searching for information. McKenzie's come out with

00:12:30.160 some 20% of time is spent in tracking down internal communication and information. So it's a massive

00:12:37.360 percentage of time, this whole scavenger hunt and searching. And the underlying principle of my book,

00:12:44.120 if I had to summarize my book in kind of a sentence, I think that to be a high performing team or

00:12:49.700 organization, you have to completely flip the strategy that you're using. So right now the

00:12:54.860 strategy that everyone's using is you're optimizing to just send information fast. You're kind of being

00:13:00.920 selfish in the sense that it's the end of the day and you just want to do what's easiest for

00:13:05.080 yourself. I send Brett a text, I send Jessica an email, I send Caleb an Asana task. And there's

00:13:13.160 no rhyme or reason. It's just maybe I preferred in the moment or I was in the tool. So it was just a

00:13:17.840 little bit quicker for me. But you can imagine when everyone is using that as a strategy, which is

00:13:22.880 basically no strategy, it's just whatever's fastest for themselves in the moment, it becomes really

00:13:28.880 difficult to find whatever you're looking for. And if people were to pause and take an extra five

00:13:34.940 seconds to just put things in the right drawer that it belongs, you're not anymore optimizing just to

00:13:40.880 send information fast, you're now optimizing to find information fast. And that's really where you

00:13:47.780 start seeing exponential time savings. And, you know, we're talking about personal life before,

00:13:52.960 take your personal life. You know, if you wanted to just finish your laundry as fast as possible,

00:13:58.660 you'd take it out of the dryer and you just throw it in one drawer and call it a day.

00:14:03.300 But most people don't do that. Most people spend an extra minute or two and you separate your socks

00:14:10.020 in one drawer, your underwear in another drawer. And we do this not because it's the fastest way to be

00:14:15.380 done with laundry, but we know that tomorrow when we need to get an outfit together, it's much faster to

00:14:20.620 find what we're looking for. And it's the same idea with business. You know, if you just on the front

00:14:26.700 end, invest a little bit extra time on the back end, everyone saves. And, you know, the chest of

00:14:33.560 drawers that we work with in business, you know, that we've got a drawer for internal communications,

00:14:39.120 a drawer for external communications, another drawer for our SOPs, like there's all these drawers.

00:14:44.220 And it's important that as a team, you're aligned on what are the drawers that we're playing with here?

00:14:48.540 And when and how do we use each of these tools? And if you do that, and everyone makes a mutual

00:14:54.400 commitment to invest a little bit of extra time to put things where it belongs, what goes around

00:14:59.580 comes around. And that's, that's really where we start seeing really fast results of 10 to 20 hours a

00:15:05.480 week back per employee very quickly.

00:15:08.460 Okay, so the scavenger hunt occurs when people optimize for the speed of transfers, you just want to use

00:15:13.280 whatever app that you like, that's the fastest use. If you like texting, you're going to text, if you like

00:15:18.200 email, you're going to use email. The problem it causes, it causes people to have to think about

00:15:21.960 where's that information?

00:15:23.120 Exactly.

00:15:23.520 Instead, we should be optimizing for the speed of retrieval of information. And you see this issue

00:15:29.040 of the scavenger hunt in your personal life too. I was looking at the tech stack that I got to use

00:15:35.580 to manage my kid's life. And it's getting out of control because like every little group they belong

00:15:40.800 to have their own communication app.

00:15:44.280 Like which one?

00:15:45.400 So they've got like, there's like the remind app for school. So like that's what the teachers use

00:15:49.820 to, you know, tell what's going on. So you got to check that there's different apps for sports,

00:15:55.660 like managing sports teams. And the problem is there's all sorts of different versions of these

00:16:00.200 types of apps out there. And so like different teams will be using a different one. And then some

00:16:05.340 teams might not use one of those apps. They might use group me. And then your church might have

00:16:09.140 their own communications app. And then like using email. And so like a lot of my bandwidth is being

00:16:15.380 sucked up by scavenger hunts. Like, okay, which app do I got to use to communicate this aspect of my

00:16:23.000 child's life? And I'm just like, man, can just people just use email? Like just, just use email.

00:16:27.820 That's all you need to use. It's, it's universal. We don't need these different communications apps.

00:16:33.440 Okay. So let's talk about how we can start reducing some of this work about work.

00:16:38.340 Talk about the communication part of your CPR framework. Let's talk about some ways that

00:16:43.700 organizations can start communicating more efficiently.

00:16:47.000 Yeah. So first of all, to reduce the scavenger hunt, as it relates to communication,

00:16:51.760 I bucket in the book communication into three sub buckets. You have personal communication,

00:16:56.620 you have internal communication with your team, and then you've got external communication. That's

00:17:00.960 clients, vendors, partners. So what I advocate for is default to text being for personal,

00:17:07.500 email being for the external, and things like Slack, Microsoft Teams being for your internal.

00:17:13.860 And there's reasons for this. Each tool has functionality that's optimized for those use

00:17:17.540 cases. But even if you don't use all of the features and automations and all those things,

00:17:23.600 which you should, don't get me wrong, just separating into those buckets makes it already

00:17:28.920 a lot easier to find what you're looking for. Because I know, hey, what did Jessica tell me?

00:17:33.620 Okay, well, Jessica's on my team. So I'll look in the internal communication tool.

00:17:37.640 Versus, hey, that could be an email, it could be a text, or it could be a Slack message.

00:17:41.880 You see what I mean? So already, you're reducing kind of where you need to look by

00:17:45.880 an order of magnitude. Then beyond that, obviously, you want to use each of these tools

00:17:50.940 to their highest and best use.

00:17:52.600 One of the most popular things we teach is inbox zero, which is essentially turning your email

00:17:57.480 into an external to-do list that other people can add to. And we don't advocate zero being

00:18:03.320 actually getting to zero, but less than 20, less than 30. You're just not wasting time

00:18:09.000 rereading things, missing things.

00:18:11.460 So in the companies you consult and in your own company, email is only for external communication.

00:18:17.740 How does using email only for external communication, not internal communication,

00:18:22.480 make a company more effective?

00:18:24.320 So for one, at least you're creating that separation. But if you think about email,

00:18:31.580 it's very basic. It's ordered chronologically, right? The most recent email is at the top of

00:18:38.080 your inbox. For tools like Slack and Microsoft Team, it's not ordered chronologically, it's ordered

00:18:43.760 by topic. You can have channels. So you could have a finance channel, a marketing channel,

00:18:48.920 an HR channel. You can get as granular as you want. And that's where you can house these

00:18:53.520 conversations. You can put third-party integrations into those channels. So I don't even need to leave

00:18:59.840 Slack. If someone signs up, if someone books a call, the things that I care about, we have

00:19:04.800 automated messages going to different channels. I turn off all the pop-ups so I'm not getting

00:19:09.840 distracted. But I don't need to log into basically any tool. I get a message in the relevant channel

00:19:15.700 in Slack for anything that I care about. Also, I just want to be clear. The rules or the framework

00:19:23.020 that I lay out, it's not meant to be 100% rigid. There's always an exception to the rule. So if your

00:19:30.780 office is on fire or getting robbed, go ahead and text someone or email someone. You know what I mean?

00:19:36.600 I'm just trying to lay out the default behavior should be this. And then use your judgment if you

00:19:42.500 need to go outside of what the normal framework is. You also provide some other advice on what

00:19:47.840 you can do to tame the email monster. And one is to be more selective about sending emails in the

00:19:55.660 first place. Maybe you don't send an email. Why is that? Well, there's a boomerang effect to emails.

00:20:00.640 The more emails you send, the more you get back. And the best way to get to inbox zero is to get to

00:20:06.840 email zero. So all the emails that should be with your team, move that to the internal

00:20:11.980 communication tool, right? Because that tool is more optimized. It's not like you're moving

00:20:16.060 crap from under one rug to moving it to under another rug. You're moving it to a place where

00:20:21.880 it's going to be easier to retrieve in the future. So the best way is to just get to email zero.

00:20:28.180 And like I said, the more you send, the more you get back. So just be mindful. Some people like to do

00:20:34.180 send laters, you know? So if you're writing emails on the weekend, maybe you hit the send

00:20:38.660 button, but there's a button where you could send later and you send it to hit their inbox on a

00:20:43.180 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

00:20:50.820 ruthless. So you're going through your inbox, you have to figure out, okay, am I going to reply to

00:20:54.600 this? Do I need to reply to this? And maybe you don't need to reply to it. It's just an

00:20:58.400 informational email. You don't have to be like, thanks. You know, it's like, you don't need to do that.

00:21:02.380 Yeah. I don't, I hate when people are like, in general, I don't do the whole thanks thing or

00:21:07.680 like the okay. Like, you know, I don't, I don't feel like we need to be overly acknowledging,

00:21:12.180 but the framework that we teach for inbox zero is called RAD, which stands for reply, archive,

00:21:17.740 and defer. Every email that comes in, those are the only three things that you can do to that email.

00:21:22.740 So if something requires a reply, I'll reply to it. Most people make the mistake though,

00:21:28.640 of thinking that they need to really be deleting a lot of emails. And I'm here to

00:21:32.340 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

00:21:41.000 archive the things that aren't important to you right now. That way it's still searchable.

00:21:45.580 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

00:21:57.360 most underutilized things in email where you can basically click a magic button and the email

00:22:02.660 disappears from your inbox and then it reappears at some date in the future. It's a great way to just

00:22:08.380 get things out of sight, out of mind, but to appear back at a specific strategic date in the future when

00:22:14.140 you do want to revisit it. Like take today's recording. You sent out some information. I read it

00:22:19.880 in the moment, but I wanted to reread it this morning. So I snoozed it and it wasn't sitting

00:22:24.980 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

00:26:14.560 a single dashboard. Wow, that's cool.

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.

00:27:13.160 What can we do to reduce the cost of 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 0.90

00:28:26.680 here? So a meeting should have an agenda. It should be really clear, what do we need to 0.99

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

00:33:05.120 to improve your internal efficiency.

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 0.98

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 1.00

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 0.76

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 0.99

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.

00:44:29.160 Tab Groups.

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

00:45:08.500 exercise, like that's a win for me.

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. 1.00

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 1.00

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.

00:48:40.720 Thanks for having me.

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

00:48:55.080 resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

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 our newsletter. We had a weekly option and daily option. They're both free. It's the best way to

00:49:15.460 stay on top of what's going on at AOM. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate you to take

00:49:19.160 one minute to use reading off a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that

00:49:22.460 already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think

00:49:26.120 we get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time,

00:49:30.060 this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into

00:49:33.980 action.

00:49:49.160 you

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The Art of Manliness - June 24, 2024

Systems and Tools for Stealing Back Hours of Productivity

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