I started a second company, and I built that company to a seven-figure profit, and sold it in 2005. What I found was that the first time I did it, Sean, was more through hard work. I gutted out 70-80 hour weeks. I bought into this myth that the first 40 hours you work are for yourself, and then anything after that is when you really get ahead, and it was just junk.

03:05

What I found is we create value through how we use our time. We don’t create value through hours and effort. And so this book, The Freedom Formula, this part has been about how to, in fact, create value in a job for a company or in a business that you own without necessarily having to get out more hours because that’s just a faulty model. And it really, really is one that I take personally because I’m a dad now. When I had my kids, my first two sons were twins, and they’re 11 now. It changed everything. It was no longer an option to be traveling two to three weeks out every month. It was no longer an option to be working 80-hour weeks. Non-negotiable. So, with my limited inventory of time, what am I going to do differently? I approached it that way, and that was almost over a decade ago.

Sean Murray  03:53

I can certainly relate to a lot of what you just talked about having been in my career through various organizations and jobs where, in my mindset, it was about how much time I put in. I was even rewarded by sticking around later in the office. In the first startup I was in, you were sort of shamed if you left at four or five o’clock. I didn’t have kids at the time, so I was just on the treadmill, saying, “Hey, I’m just going to keep going. I can outwork anybody here, and I’m going to climb up the corporate ladder.” I eventually got married, had kids, and changed my mindset. You introduce this really cool concept around mindset and thinking about work, introducing two ways to think about it: “The Time and Effort Economy” and “The Value Economy”. So, maybe talk about that, because I found it really helpful.

David Finkel  04:42

Most of us live in a world where we think we get paid for hours and effort, and maybe to a little degree, for attitude. We call that the “time and effort economy” and that says things like “If I don’t keep checking my inbox, if I’m not accessible, I may miss something important or my boss might think I’m not working.” The “value economy” says, “Look. You’re not getting paid for hours and effort. You need hours and you need effort, but you need to create value.” And ultimately, everyone works in the value economy. So the value economy says, “If I keep interrupting my best work by checking these apps and checking my alerts, then I can’t create value.” Or “If my boss sees that I don’t create value, that’s what’s going to upset her, not my accessibility or unresponsiveness.”

I think it’s really important because when we make that change to thinking about the greatest contribution I can give to this company, to this team, to this department, to this division, to this whatever project it might be, I don’t need raw undifferentiated hours. I need a higher quality of hours. I need quality chunks of my best attention, like of an hour or three hours. If I can get those consistent hours and put them into the more important things, what happens is I can create more value in less time. It’s not hours and effort. It’s value created. I think we have to keep that in mind because we convinced ourselves, “I just need to get out more time,” and it becomes a trap. When I work really hard, what happens is I start doing the wrong things, and that doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t help my company, my employer, my employees. It doesn’t help anybody. I’ve got to focus on those things that actually matter with blocks of my best attention.

Sean Murray  06:20

There are a couple of things going on there that are really important, and I just want to focus on. One is that there are certain times of the day when we are at our best, when we are just ready to go. For me, it’s when I wake up, and I have that first cup of coffee. My mind is at its best then. Later in the day, I’m not as good at creative work. So that’s part of it. What part of the day are we at our best? The second part is to what you were saying around value. What do we do with that time? Putting those two things together, which if you look at most schedules, and I have to say I’ve been guilty, like many of us, that I often will check my email during that time when I’m ready to be most productive.

David Finkel  07:01

That’s right. I look at any listener to this particular podcast, and what I would really encourage you to do if you want to enjoy the good life, is you have to just look at your schedule, whether you have an inventory of a 40-hour or a 60-hour workweek, just change how you do five or eight hours a week. That’s the starting point.

We talked about focus days versus push days, a focus day is the one or two days a week that you’re going to carve out a 2-hour to 4-hour block once in that day when you’re at your best. I’ve been a morning person since I’ve had kids, so it’s the first thing I do. And then, on every push day, I’m going to carve out 1-hour or 1.5-hour focus blocks. I can do everything else the same, and I call this my buffet strategy of time management. Think about it this way: You go to a buffet, –and I love Vegas buffets. I mean, like, you could just pig right out. But I know that the most important plate of food at a buffet is my first plate of food. If I can have that first plate be nutritious, of good stuff, vegetables, maybe high-quality protein, even if I eat the junk, I’ve already got the nutrition from that first plate, and my stomach is partially filled, so I won’t eat so much of the crap.

Time is the same way. For me, I’ll make sure that on Tuesday, I come into the office, and from 8:30 all the way through to 11:30, those three hours that I have there, that’s my focus block for the week. I’m not going to do junk stuff. I’m not going to check my email first. I’m going to have the away message already set. I’m going to have the stage set the day before so that when I walk in that morning, my highest value project is right there. It might be a meeting with a key constituency of people. It might be a project that I’ve worked one-to-one. I’m looking at doing something that truly creates the most value for my role or for my company. And if I do that five hours a week, that I just make small shifts, one focus a day a week for a three-hour block, then on two of the other push days, you’re just changing an hour. I’ve changed just five hours, but I spread that over the next year, and that gives me an extra five and a half work weeks of full-time my best time to focus on those things that matter.

And here’s the one last thing I’ll share. If you don’t have it blocked in as a recurring schedule in your appointment, you’re going to go right over it and do other stuff. I know it. I’ve shared this with executives, business owners, entrepreneurs. When they put it in their calendar as a recurring appointment, they’re going to be 80% to 90% true to holding their focus time for high-value activities. And that’s all you need. You don’t need to be perfect, you just need to be better about reclaiming some of your best time for your higher-value activities. That’s a simple, easy tactic to do it. Put it in as a recurring appointment in your Google calendar or your Outlook calendar, and that way you know that you’re not going to schedule over it. And please don’t take the first hit of email or social media because once you start down that road, you and I both know where it ends. You’re going to be left kind of jonesing for more of it. You have to go cold turkey for just a 2-hour or 3-hour block, and then you can go and get your fix of email. But for that block, you’re going to create value.

Sean Murray  10:03

One thing that I kept coming back to as I read your book, I was thinking about it in the back of my mind was Warren Buffett. And we here on The Investor’s Podcast Network, we talk a lot about value investing. Warren is widely considered the best investor of his generation, and if you look at how he spends his time, as I was reading your book, I thought, “Warren does that.” Just to give a few examples, he doesn’t use email. He doesn’t have a computer on his desk. He knows that reading and thinking is the highest value of an investor. This is someone who is a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but he spends the majority of his day in his office reading and thinking because he has eliminated all this stuff. He’s literally figured out the A-Time and is doing it. Look at the superpower you have when you do that. I think Warren is just a great example. Your system describes something that Warren sort of figured out through the years and I think we could all benefit from it.

David Finkel  11:05

I totally agree with that. I mean, the whole idea of the freedom formula was this idea of how to mechanically operationalize what it means to work smarter. Everyone says, “I’m supposed to work smarter. Don’t tell me I’m supposed to do that. Give me the nitty-gritty to actually do that in the face of all this stuff.” Now, Warren has done a phenomenal job at it, right? That’s why he’s as wealthy as he is. He knows he creates the most value by making really smart investment decisions, buying companies, which for him means pulling in data in structured ways that he can think and sift and connect the dots between that side. He knows that. Wonderful. Imagine if he was doing texts or emails the whole day through, like some of these traders you’ll see online. No wonder they’re not going to have the same result that he has. They don’t give a fraction of their best attention to what they’re doing in a way that he does with a laser focus for hours over a day. It’s truly remarkable.

Sean Murray  12:01

One of the images that really struck me in your book was the graphic of your calendar. You shared a scaled-back version of your calendar, but it shows these blocks of time, and it looks like a typical Outlook calendar or iCalendar on a computer. You’ve actually blocked out focus time, and it really got me thinking about my own calendar. When I saw that, I thought, “Okay, I’ve got to put that in the calendar. Otherwise, it doesn’t happen.” Right? You just blow right through it. So, I love that, and I’m going to start using that. What I wanted to get into was what do you do to block things out? Because you already mentioned email as sort of a dopamine hit? What do you do to stay focused during a focus block?

David Finkel  12:44

Let’s take one step back. The first exercise I would challenge someone to do before I even block off my focus time is to create what we call your Time Value Matrix. Take Pareto’s principle, put it on steroids, take it to its most productive extreme. What I need to do, I need to get clear in writing. What do I do that actually creates the most value? What are the things that I do that truly contribute the most? Here’s the interesting part. The most successful people don’t do more, they do a heck of a lot less. But the less that they do, creates a heck of a lot more value.

Pareto’s principle is about most people’s distinction around time. 80% of what I do is very low value, and grades 20% of my result. We call that D-Time, that 80% junk. And we say, “Okay, well 20% of what I do creates 80% of the value.” That’s C-Time. Think about it. Four times less input, creating four times more output means that every 1 hour of C-Time is 16 times more valuable than 1 hour of D-Time, and that makes sense, right? But most people stop there. If 20% of what I do gives me 80% of the result, then 20% of the 20% gives me 80% of the 80%, and the math works out this magic 4%, and gives us 64% of our result. And if we do it one more time, the math works out to be that roughly 1% in, gives me half the result. Now, I don’t believe that this is a law like gravity. I think it’s a really good model for how to think about it. When we identify in writing what our A- and B-level activities are, here’s the thing, going back to our focus blocks, I only do A- or B-level activities during those focus blocks. And if I do that 80-90% of the time, I don’t have to be perfect, but if I’m a B minus student or better at that, I’m going to get a significant bump to what I can create at the value that I can produce.

Sean Murray  14:41

That’s great, so we want to fill that focus time with A- and B-level work, which are the select activities that add the most value to our business, to our organization, or to our portfolio. For an investor, that might be reading an annual report or studying the investment philosophies of other great friends. But I think it’s important to share something that I’ve noticed in my career, and it’s that A level time is not only alone time. If I can take an hour and coach a junior employee to be more productive and add more value, I consider that A-time as well.

David Finkel  15:17

You hit it right on the head, if you could see my office, there’s a board over on the side there, and I put little tick marks. I’ve learned this back in the day when I used to play sports. I visualize and shrink the units of accountability by seeing these little tick marks on my board. One of the categories is that I have a goal that every week I have three quality coaching or development conversations with my leadership team. Three. Now for example, later today, I’m going to be talking with our COO, and she’s phenomenal. She has been with me for 11 years now. She’s worth taking the extra time to think about what skills she needs to develop or giving guide questions for her to get better. Going back to this, leveraging staff is a great use of time. Especially developing other people, so they can go higher up that value hierarchy. Absolutely.

Sean Murray  16:07

The other thing you mentioned in your book is the importance of actually writing down the activities that create the most value. There’s something about the activity of putting your thoughts on paper. It forces us to think more clearly, reveals the flaws in our thinking, and allows us to avoid muddled thinking. In fact, Jeff Bezos of Amazon is a big believer in this too. He has banned PowerPoint because he thinks it leads to lazy reasoning. If someone is going to pitch him an acquisition or a new project, he requires that they write out a thesis for why, and sometimes these go to four or five pages. He believes there’s something about writing that really forces us to think through all the connections and understand our subject.

David Finkel  16:51

Writing organizes your thinking. There’s no question about it. One of the things in the Freedom Formula is we have a worksheet that talks about the time value matrix where we can structure information so that it’s visually obvious. It makes it easy for us to be very focused. So, if I’ve got 2 people I lead, or 200 people I lead, it doesn’t matter. If my people don’t know what their A- and B-level activities are, and what their D-level activities are, the game’s over. And notice that what I said is my D-level activities, and my A- and B-level activities. I don’t worry so much about C-level activities.

This is a little bit of a hack, a shortcut that your listeners can really learn. After doing this for a decade, I used to think your C-level activities matter. They don’t. D-level activities matter because that’s where I get my raw time from. Those are the things that I eliminate, delegate, delete altogether, or defer to later, or design out so they don’t come up, to begin with. That’s where I get my raw time back. The A- and B-level activities are what matters. C-level activities will take care of itself. The attorney is going to do his billable work. The other consultant, she’s going to do her billable hours, or whatever it might be. But the A and B level activities are the stuff that often isn’t urgent and so it’s forgotten. So, we rob from D-Time, that mass 80%, and reinvest in these A- and B-level activities for the 4% sweet spot and this 1% magic that creates so much of our results.

Sean Murray  18:15

You talked in the book about the barriers to making the jump between the time and effort economy and the value economy. You called them the five chains. You get shackled. We all get shackled to this idea that by working harder, we can get ahead, or maybe we intellectually understand the value economy but things hold us back from really making the jump. Maybe we could go through those because I think I’m guilty of several of them, and it would be helpful to talk through what prevents us from taking the steps to chunking out our time, focusing on doing the A, B, C, and D-level activities, and all that.

David Finkel  18:54

Before we get into how to operationalize working smarter, you have to ask: What’s holding you back?

The first chain, as I call it, is the faulty model. We talked about that. It’s the belief that we’re getting paid for hours and effort, and unfortunately, Sean, a lot of companies, or a lot of bad managers, push their people to believe it. As I say this, I go backward in time seven or eight years ago. I was that bad manager. Somebody didn’t get back to my email right away, and I would say, “Hey, why didn’t you get back to me?” What I did is I trained them to be responsive over creating value. If Teresa, for example, has her focus days on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if she’s in her focus time, do I really want her to take and answer an email that’s of low value? Would I want her to interrupt doing high-value work to do my low-value junk? No way. I have to be careful there.

The second chain that holds us into this time and effort economy is actually a medical condition. It’s called controlitis, the inflammation of your control gland. Think about it. Most of us that are success-minded people were totally freaked out with the thought of being out of control, so we’d grip tighter. Because of that, we don’t delegate, and we micromanage. All that is driven by the desire for control, which is driven by the fear of feeling helpless and being out of control. “Oh, I got burned once. That’s never going to happen again.” That’s a stupid thing to say. Low-value stuff shouldn’t be micromanaged by you. The high-value stuff, perhaps.

The third chain is the lack of clarity. What is it that we really do that creates most value? We talk about the freedom formula as creating a 90-day plan of action, a rolling quarterly plan of action on one page. Not 20 pages, but one page every quarter.

The fourth is a lack of depth. What we mean by that is that everything’s working well, but then Sheila, gets sick, and now we’re scrambling because there’s no depth there. No one knows how to do what she does. Strategic depths are the systems, the cross-train team, and the culture that says, “We always have each other’s back. We back each other up.” Nothing’s kept just in one person’s head.

The fifth chain is our outdated time habits. The world has changed, but how we think about time, how we use technology, and how we design workflow hasn’t kept pace.

Those are the five chains that hold me into the time and effort economy that I need to break.

Sean Murray  21:15

All of those are so important, and we could do a deeper dive. But let’s start with that last one, the outdated time habits. Right now, many of us are working from home, many of us for the first time. A lot of the meetings that people were in before are now forced to be on Zoom. Some are just dropped entirely because you realized that maybe those meetings didn’t need to happen, so there’s that part of it. But there’s also the need to be more self-directed, to be disciplined when you’re working from home, to stay on-task, to stay on-focus, to rethink what you’re doing. I guess, for many of us, we’re realizing that times have changed. Technology is here, and we can think about our time differently. We’re also not commuting, which is another one. So, what are some of the outdated time habits that we can throw out the window?

David Finkel  22:05

Let me come in at two different directions. I’m going to give a very concrete mundane one, and I’m going to give one that’s a little bit more analytic.

For the more mundane, think about email. Email is no longer a new technology. It’s been around for decades. Now, I remember moving that move, but we used email to manage to-dos. It’s a horrible tool for that. It’s the wrong tool. Email is like one of those little message slips you used to get on paper. They’re great to give you quick prompts. It’s in writing, so you have a visual marker. But the next slip is going to replace that slip. It’s going to get mislaid. There are project management tools or to-do lists online that we can share that are so much better for managing that.

I know a lot of people that also try to have adult conversations through email. It’s horrible in today’s world. You can’t do it. There’s no tone and no ability or sensitivity to how it’s responded.

I see people try to use email as a way of giving updates, but what they do, though, is they give it as like a blog. Structured reports are so much better, like a dashboard, or even like what we use with our clients, which we call “Big Rock” Report. It’s one of the pieces that you would have read in The Freedom Formula. We find that if we can have information structured, that lowers the info load on the other person. When I look at a Big Rock Report, if I had the same information come in a paragraph format in an email, it would probably take me 15 minutes to parse through that. When I get it from my key direct reports, I can easily see my one or two “big rocks” from the prior week and how I did, my victories, my challenges, and other bullet point updates. When I get it in this structured way, it probably takes me 4-5 minutes to go through it. That’s three times faster, and I understand, digest, and can use it better. So that’s an example of an outdated time habit, for sure.

23:56

Another example would be that a lot of us think that we should have job descriptions and job descriptions matter. Here are your roles and your tasks that you’re responsible for, but think about going home. If you’re working remotely, the biggest point-failure for people who work remotely– And I know this as I’ve done remote workforce. Hundreds of people have worked for me over the last 20 years. All remote, never had an office where we had everybody. We were scattered all over North America, primarily. And what I’ve learned is, I can’t just take a job description. I’ve got to go one more section, and ask the question: What does great performance in this role look like? And how can the person know that they’re doing a great job? How are we measuring their performance? Quantitatively? Qualitatively?

For example, if Bonnie is responsible for scheduling in your office, your goal is how can you have 240 hours scheduled per week that are held? If I give it to her that way, I can say, “You’re responsible for the schedule, Bonnie.” That helps. But when I say, “Here’s what great performance looks like. Here’s how you know you’re doing a great job. Here’s how I know, as a company, that you’re doing a great job,” it makes it so much easier for your staff to thrive remotely, and for you to know that they’re doing a great job. That’s an example of an outdated time habit of thinking, “Oh, I just go do my job remotely.” No, I need to have a much greater degree of specificity of what success looks like and how it is measured in this role quantitatively, and also qualitatively.

Sean Murray  25:28

You know, what I like about that is you’re updating the job description for the value economy. Rather than listing responsibilities, you’re being very specific by saying something like, “If you can schedule X number of calls, or produce X number of quality proposals, that’s what success looks like. That’s how you can add value to the firm. It doesn’t matter so much how many hours it takes you, or even how you do it necessarily. What matters is if you hit the number.

David Finkel  25:56

One more thing I’ll share for people who are new to working remotely. Whether it’s just you, or your managing some other people, here’s another secret tip: shrink the units of accountability. When you’re in an office environment, it’s easy to say, “Hey, let me know at the end of the week, or let me know at the end of the month how this came up.” But when you’re working from a remote office, there are so many distractions. I want to have daily and weekly progress check-ins in some mechanism, whether that’s online through a project tool that’s updated daily, or that’s reporting that gets reviewed weekly. I can’t wait for a month. It’s too long for me to go off-course. I’ve got to shrink the units of accountability daily, or at the very longest weekly.

Sean Murray  26:38

You know, what I really like about chunking it down and making each milestone a little more accessible is there’s an emotional component, that passion or the zest for diving into it. And when you’ve got a victory, when you meet a small goal like that, it motivates you to get to the next goal. So, if you can get through that first week or two and have your plan, all of a sudden you tell yourself, “Hey, I can do this. I can think about the next milestone,” and you’re sort of building in successes. It reminds me of running a 10K marathon or something like that. If you’ve got someone cheering for you every mile or so, or you run past the band playing, or whatever, it’s sort of pumps you up, and you say, “Okay. Just think about the next mile,” and you eventually get through it.

David Finkel  27:21

That’s right. Whether it be for myself or for my staff, the way we inspire is that people need to see progress. They need to feel progress. I don’t make up progress, but as a leader of myself, or of a team, I need to make progress visible. I gave the example earlier about that board where I check off my three conversations or more of real coaching for development conversations with my direct reports. When I do that, when I can make it visible, whether it be on a daily or a weekly basis, it makes it so much easier to sustain the change. That is why, on the Big Rock Report we go through in The Freedom Formula, we have a section for victory. When we can see our victories, we get those microdoses of dopamine. We feel good about it, and it sustains us. Because let’s face it, times can be hard. People say no, clients have tough conversations with us, suppliers fall through, but if we can find that we’re making progress toward things that matter, it’s much easier for us to stay the course. And when we stay the course long enough that we can compel those changes over time, that’s how we succeed.

Sean Murray  28:28

I want to go back to the topic of email, as well. It’s one of those that just seems to be the thing that holds many of us back. It’s going again and again to our inbox. You mentioned in focused time that you want to block that out. One thing I’ve noticed is if I do manage to have an hour or two of blocking out email, my email gets batched. All of those messages that I was going to check one at a time, are sitting there. I’ve actually noticed that, sometimes, the email that came in right at the beginning of my two hours of writing block is already answered. If I wait two hours to check it, sometimes it answers itself because someone got copied on it, and they’d answer. There are all these advantages to batching that we don’t get if we are constantly reacting to email.

David Finkel  29:23

That’s right. Here’s two more that you get. Number one, the more email I send, the more I get because every time I send an email, it increases the odds that someone emails me back. When I batch, I actually send less out because I might handle two or three things in one email. Number two, the faster I respond, the more email I get. If I can age my email for an hour or a day, or in some cases a week or two, I get a lot less of it. So, by batching, I automatically am getting the benefit of delaying, and by doing that, I don’t get that instant messenger back and forth, where you’re almost having a conversation through email. Which is not what it’s intended to do at all. It’s a poor-quality substitute for a messenger app or an actual conversation by far.

One more thing I love about email is what I call the 1-2-3 Subject Line. First of all, if I can make it easier for all the people who receive email from me, hopefully, they’ll reciprocate, and make it easier for me. The subject line is really important. No more is it okay to put down “checking in.” No, no, no, we need a much more beefed-up email, like a status update on a Sorenson project, but more of that I should put a one, two, or three at the beginning of the email.

A #1 says, “This is urgent and truly important. Drop everything and look at this.” Hopefully, we don’t live our lives in that urgency. In my company, I might see a #1 email once, maybe twice, a quarter. From me, staff members might see it once or twice per month. It shouldn’t be more than that. That means we’re too reactive. A #2 means, “Hey, there’s something you need to do with this email, but do it in a reasonable timeframe. If you got it at eight o’clock in the morning, by the end of the day. If you got it at four in the afternoon, by sometime early tomorrow morning.” A #3 is an FYI.

31:11

And again, one of the best principles of design is we can structure information to make it easier for the person to digest it. We’re saving everyone time, which is why then what I do is I audit by email. Who do I send emails the most to? Who sends most to me? The people I send the most to, I reach out to them saying, “Hey, tell me what are two or three things that I could do to make your life easier? Could I CC you less? Could I put all the three emails into one? Could I bullet point things out better? Could I enumerate the list? Tell me what I can do to make your life easier, and here are two things that you could do for me that would make it much easier for me to reduce the email burden, the info load that your emails are causing to me.” When organizations are having these conversations in a really open manner, they’re very productive to reduce the info load that email is, which is a drag, on many organizations.

Here’s where the numbers help. I could send an email that says, “#2 Sean, #3 Theresa, Larry.” So Theresa and Larry, know that they don’t have to do that. I know a lot of people do that by using the CC line or whatever, but what it does is it lets you look through your inbox, and you can triage in batch a lot better. “Oh, I’ve got a couple of #2s. I better look at those quickly. The #3s, I can deal with those later. I’m doing higher-value stuff now.”

Sean Murray  32:37

Absolutely. If you look at the amount of email you get, and you think about the cognitive load of looking at each email anew, trying to figure out if it’s #1, #2, or #3, if it’s not labeled, trying to figure it out on your own if it’s urgent, or just an FYI, or if you need to do something, that time if you multiply it times the number of emails you get in a day, so an extra 15-30 seconds x 100 emails x 220 workdays, or something, now you’re starting to talk about just sitting there trying to figure out what this email is about.

David Finkel  33:15

We were hosting a conference, and I did a quick survey. On average, they were wasting 12 to 14 hours per week on low-value email. A day and a half of their working life was junk email, and I don’t think things are better. But you can make it better doing the things we’ve said. Also, you can leverage your personal assistant with your inbox, which is one of the things I shared in The Freedom Formula. The key is when you really see the cumulative loss to your career, or to your company, it gives you the motivation to do something about it.

Sean Murray  33:48

Let me give you an advanced question. I tried to get focused time. I’m working on writing right now. It requires a lot of effort for my mind to be at its best. I’ll carve out the time, I’ll go into my computer. I’ll tell myself I’m not going to look at email, but my phone will be close by, of course. I find all of a sudden, I’m looking at something on my phone even if it doesn’t give me a notification. There’s something that sort of draws me in. How do you get beyond that?

David Finkel  34:16

That’s great. I’m going to give you a couple of answers. So first of all, I’ll share with you a story inside of The Freedom Formula. In the very last chapter, we talk about leveraging better design. We talked about Maureen and she was the Chief Information Officer/Technology Officer at a technology company. She talked about how she went to a communal area, got away from her office with all the visual reminders on a wall of all the other projects she had to do. She was away from her desktop, but she forgot about her watch, which of course was a smartwatch, and then she laughed about it.

So, here are two things you can do. One is, in my office, I try not to spend focus time on my computer, generally. I’ll go to a laptop, but I don’t have my Outlook open. I turn off my Outlook. Now, I might leave the calendar up, but I turn off the email, I literally click it closed. Sure, it would take me 30 seconds to reboot it to check email. It’s like taking the cookies and moving them on top of a shelf across the room. If I can design my environment to make it a little bit easier, it makes a difference.

35:21

I’ll give one last tip here for focus time. We as human beings become conditioned by our environment, so in my office, there’s a couch. That couch is where I’ve written almost every one of my books. When I’m writing, I do it on that couch. That couch is a cue, a conditioned cue for me that I’m going to do my high-value activity, write another book. Without that couch, I wouldn’t have written probably any of my 12 books. With that couch, it’s like a secret weapon. So, for you, maybe you can have a spot in your office, a chair in your office, or could you have a spot in like a conference room you go into? Could it be a cafe? I know, right now, we can’t, but later on, is there a cafe you could go to? Can you work from home one morning per week? When I control my environment, it makes it much easier for the environment to cue me into those behaviors of focus.

Sean Murray  36:12

That reminds me of a book I read recently. It’s called On Writing by Stephen King. He talks about his writing habits, and he has a separate room for writing. He’s very religious in his consistency of going in that room, I think at the same time every day, and he doesn’t leave until he hits a certain number of words, but the computer in that room does not have access to the internet. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t bring a phone in. And he knows that what he does adds the most value because he has to talk to agents, he has to talk to the business side of his work, but what he does to add value is he writes, and he knows that. He puts the time in. Physically getting out of your regular work to do your focus work, I think, is a great idea. I’m going to try it.

David Finkel  36:53

That’s great. The reason why most people don’t do this is that we’re afraid of what we’re gonna miss, and so, I call it the needle in the haystack. For example, in the book, we talked in the chapter about leveraging better design a client of ours. Her name is Andrea. She was thinking, “I’m going to be on email all the time because I might miss a customer email that’s really important for her retail business.” I asked her, “How often does it happen?” She replied, “Well, maybe very rare.” I asked, “Well, how often?” She put the number at about one out of every thousand emails would be a really, really critical thing. I said, “This is crazy. You’re reading 999 emails to find out one.”

Take the needle in the haystack, for example. Couldn’t we just get rid of the haystack and deliver the needle differently? Could you give them a different mechanism to get ahold of you? Could you set up a separate email? Could you have your assistant screen and text you? Could you give them a WhatsApp account only for emergencies? Could you give them a hotline number? Give them a different way. I don’t want my staff to have to do emails at night on the weekend.

For example, Larry who runs our technology. If he answers email at night on the weekend, I’m going to give him a hard time about that. I want him to be with his family during that time. But if our site goes down, I need to be able to reach him, right? So he knows. I’ll give him a text on a cell phone. I don’t use text lightly in our company. For us, a text is kind of a #1. “This is an emergency that matters. But all the other stuff can wait until Monday morning, enjoy your weekend.”

When we have that different mechanism to deliver that high-value emergency, we don’t have to have this low-level of vigilance for email that’s non-stop. It frees up so much bandwidth for you to be creative, productive, and create more value.

Sean Murray  38:33

I’m glad you brought up the texting because that’s sort of email next level in some ways, at least as far as an interruption. The thing is synchronous and asynchronous. Text is more synchronous as you’re saying, “Hey, David, I wanted to talk to you right now. I need to get your attention. I’m going to try to pull you out of whatever you’re doing.” Email, to me, it’s a little bit more like saying, “I’m just going to drop a message to David. When he gets back to me, he will.” And I’m already, in most environments, kind of conditioned to having a time lag. If you’re in an environment where texting, just everyone has the freedom to take each other’s time, that could just be extremely frustrating.

David Finkel  39:13

Texting has its place. If I were in an environment that everyone had talked by text, personally, I would make sure I had a different cell phone for when I was not at work. I would buy a second line and spend $30-40 a month on it because, otherwise, I’ll get roped in.

In my world, no one texts lightly. If I saw my staff texting lightly, I get on their case about it. It’s just not our culture. But if I was in that culture, then I would find ways that, during my focus time, I’ll turn my text off. I need to give people an alternative to get me in a true emergency defined well. Now if it can’t be texting because I already screwed that one up, then maybe I’ll use WhatsApp, or maybe I’ll use a different mechanism. Maybe I’ll have them call my assistant, and let her tap me on the shoulder. I do need to give them a mechanism. For example, maybe I’ll call them. And if they ignore the call, but I call back a second or third time, they know this is a true emergency.

But please, most people think stuff is urgent. It’s not. It’s just that you’re impatient. And if you have an honest conversation about the cost, about the burden on everybody, like wanting our stuff answered quickly, that means that everybody else is going to be responding and distracted, just like they expect fast responses from us. And the cost is just too high. When we get clean on that, we change and create a different culture, and say, “Let’s do a 30-day experiment. Here are the ground rules. Here’s what we hope to see. Here’s what we’ll pay attention to.” Halfway through, we’ll have conversations to see what’s working well, and what isn’t working well that we want to adjust going forward for the second half of the experiment. I think any company that does that for even 30 days will never go back to the old chaotic wild west ways.

Sean Murray  41:00

Some of these messaging apps that reside on the desktop are just as bad, if not worse, as far as interruptions. I think that’s a good point.

I want to talk about the value of having an assistant as you brought it up several times. Let’s go into it a little deeper because that’s something that I personally have had a challenge with. The reason why is actually a medical condition called controlitis, so help me overcome my medical condition here, David. If I were to get an assistant, build that assistant into my workflow, how do I do it, and how would it change my life?

David Finkel  41:36

Great question. So, I have my first assistant, but I was so scared of asking her to do stuff 24 years ago. “Let me fax that for you because I’m scared of asking you to do something demeaning, like faxing something.” Crazy, right? Crazy. Nowadays, I have two assistants. One is my local because I work remotely, so she comes over to my office and does local stuff, like if I need my tires changed because of snow versus summer season where I live in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She does that. And then, I have Emily who works remotely, who’s about an 8-hour drive from where I live. The two of them, Tiffany and Emily, are godsends. Once you get used to it, you will never go back.

That said, the first step to do is to just start keeping a sheet of paper at the side of your desk. As you start doing things to the day, keep adding “What you did today that an assistant could have done part or all of.” Secondly, once that list starts showing pretty long, now ask, “Who would be the right assistant for me?  Do I need a full-time person or a part-time person? On-site? On a distance? Overseas?” I can start small. If I’ve got staff, could one of the people I currently have be used across multiple people?

That said, I need to know myself first. The reason why people screw up with an assistant is that they hire the wrong person. For me, I’m not a talker. I don’t really want interaction, so my assistant can’t be someone who takes that personally. “Oh, David hasn’t talked with me for four days now. He must be angry. I must be doing a bad job.” I cannot have a nervous assistant. Other people, they need to talk and interact. That would freak my assistant out. My assistants don’t want that interaction because they know it’s not who I am.

I want to delegate auditorily, so I’ll use an app to leave quick 10-second or 10-minute messages for people. I want you to do this off the top of mind. Quick, we’ll touch the button. Other people want to delegate by writing it out. Some people want to have phone conversations, and some people want to meet. If I meet or talk on the phone, that 2-minute delegation just turned into 10 minutes. I’m not interested in that, so whoever I hire has to be able to accommodate my information-delegation style, and I don’t want them to delegate back to me. I don’t want them to share information auditorily. I don’t want audio messages. I want them to give me updates in writing, either through a quick email, or in most cases, through a project management tool. We use Asana for my assistants and me, but I want to see it because I can read it about 10 times faster, and have it there for a reminder for me.

44:07

When I know who I want to hire, and I know what I want them to do, now, there are two more things I would share as a quick suggestion. One is, with your assistant, to make part of their role that they’re going to create a system for being a great assistant for you right from the very start. I’ve gone through probably 16-17 assistants over the last 24 years. When they’re really good, I promote them, and they still work with me. When they’re not, or they have a life change, like one of my assistants went to vet school, fantastic, I wish her well. But I want the next assistant to start from where the other person left off, which means documentation, processes, procedures, historic key information being saved in organized ways.

The final tip I’ll share here is to have one list to rule them all. Think of the Lord of the Rings. I don’t want them managing the to-dos on an email. I want them to have one list that has everything that I’ve asked them to do in one place because as long as I see it on the list, I can relax and know that at least they’ve captured it correctly.

So those are some quick tips that I found for me. They have to add me in their own list. Whoever writes it down, owns it. If I write it on the list for them, I still psychologically and emotionally own it. They write it, they own it. And because it’s on the list, I can quickly scan down through it, and make sure that I spot-check that they’ve got it all done.

Sean Murray  45:25

I’d like to end on this idea with: “What do we do with the time that, if we can really implement a system like this, will motivate us? What do we do with the time? You’ve got wonderful stories in the book about clients you’ve worked with that have literally had life-changing experiences reconnecting with family or spouses or saving relationships. That, I think, is the ultimate value of what a system like this is doing, David. Maybe you could speak a little to that.

David Finkel  45:57

The subtitle for The Freedom Formula is How to Succeed in Business, Without Sacrificing Family, Health, or Life. When we look at things in connection, business matters, but our life matters a whole lot more. Business success is what I’ll call a sufficiency need. We need a certain amount of success to feel purpose, to take care of our economic needs. But at a certain point, we have to be careful not to let habit, ego, and self-aggrandizement pull us to just being that person chasing after more and more and more. There’s a wonderful book. The title, by itself, is probably enough. The book was by John Bogle, one of the famous value investors who founded Vanguard. The book was called Enough.

Also, my friend Stephanie Harkness asked me three questions years ago, and Stephanie is one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs I’ve ever met. Plus, she’s life successful. She and her husband, Jack, has been married for over 50 years. Stephanie was the former chairperson of the National Association of Manufacturers. She’s built a $100+ million company. She had three questions: What matters most? How much is enough? And for the sake of what? When we ask those questions, work matters, but your family, your health, and having a life beyond that matters a heck of a lot more. And so, I know, for me, those three questions keep me in balance.

Sean Murray  47:18

That’s great. I have not read the Bogle book. I am a big fan of Jack Bogle, so I’m definitely going to check that out. I didn’t know he wrote Enough. I can’t wait to read about it.

David, this has been just a wonderful conversation. Where can people learn more about what you do in The Freedom Formula?

David Finkel  47:36

Absolutely! First of all, get a copy of The Freedom Formula from pretty much any bookstore they go into. Or, in today’s world, they can check Amazon or barnesandnoble.com. Number two, take a look at the website that comes with the book. What we’ve learned is I probably had to cut out maybe 100,000 words out of the book. My publisher was freaking out as it was reaching about 900 pages, so they made me cut it. So, what I did was bend the rules a little bit. I created a bonus website where we put several hours of video and PDF tools. Basically, I’m an entrepreneur. If I can’t do it one way, fine. I’ll find a different way around it. So, if they go to freedomtoolkit.com, they can actually get a hold of those tools. They can even get a peek of the first two chapters of the book, and read it for themselves, but freedomtoolkit.com would be where I would send them to.

Sean Murray  48:18

Right. I will put a link to that in the show notes, as well. I just want to say, David, thanks for being on The Good Life.

David Finkel  48:26

I appreciate that, Sean. Thank you for having me.

Outro  48:29

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