Ari Meisel

The Less Doing Story

What it was like, What happened, and What it’s like now

This blog post marks the 100th piece I’ve written here on Medium. So I figured it was time to tell you a little story about how we got started. You know to memorialize that sh*t.

Thanks, BTW, for reading and following and sharing and all those other modern metrics of support. I really appreciate it.

Here goes…

My name is Ari Meisel and I am the Founder of Less Doing — a coaching program that helps entrepreneurs who have opportunity in excess of what their infrastructure can support, find focus, flexibility, and freedom in their business.

My Replaceable Founder Methodology delivered through online courses, one-day intensives, and through our group coaching program, enables entrepreneurs to become replaceable so they can scale their business.

My podcast, The Less Doing Podcast recently published its 400th Episode and has been downloaded 1 million times.

Although I began coaching individuals who were hungry for greater productivity for a long time now, I began coaching businesses in earnest two years ago. Our first year we hit the million-dollar revenue mark and we are on pace to surpass that this year.

But it’s a metric I don’t embrace as much as the results our clients get when they follow my Methodology. That’s success to me.

The Backstory

Imagine this. You’re 20 years old, you’re working on a project that you’re spending 18 hours a day, you’re young, you’re full of energy, full of vigor, and you’re working nonstop 18 hours a day. Hard-charging, being super productive, and three years of doing that, you find yourself with a chronic illness, and it nearly kills you. All the while, you’re building up debt and not getting things done. This chronic illness takes you from working 18 hours a day to barely struggling to get an hour of work on any given day. What do you do? I think most people would probably give up.

Or…

You find a new way of doing things in that one hour that you have.

Now, that was me when I got diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and my response to that was creating a brand new system of productivity that would allow me to get a maximum amount done, actually more than I’d ever gotten done before in much less time.

If you ask somebody, who works a nine to five job, “what would you do? If you could only work till four? The answer is easy, “skip lunch,” but if you ask that same person, what would you do if you only had an hour of the day to get that work done?

It requires an entirely different kind of thinking. One that most people are not even aware of because the question isn’t what would you do? It’s what wouldn’t you do? If those things that you wouldn’t do still have to get done, who or what is going to do them for you?

The whole idea of working smarter versus harder is particularly relevant here. No time restriction says you can not be more productive. It does not exist. I’ve seen so many different situations where people thought that they had no more time, and the time was their problem. Time is never the problem. It’s just about how you use it.

And that’s how I came up with the idea for Less Doing and The Replaceable Founder Methodology.https://upscri.be/6892b4?as_embed=true

Back in the day

I began helping people with their personal productivity and launched a product called “Overhwhelmology 101 attached here http://less.do/iqwyHI

It quickly morphed into a more business-centric product and The Replaceable Founder Methodology was born. Honestly, I thought I needed more team members, more software, more everything in the beginning, but then I started employing my own Methodology and things got pretty optimized, automated, and outsourced really fast.

One of the biggest things we learned when we were just starting out is that the best way to build a scalable, automated business organization is to break it up into pieces. An early mistake we made was investing thousands of dollars into an “all-in-one CRM” — it ended up being completely useless to us and continues to sit there gathering dust.

A smart, automated business has multiple moving parts which specialize in different business functions in your organization. Not only does this allow you to handle each business unit well, it also makes debugging easier — you have multiple points of failure that you can dive into rather than a single, massive, messy monolith.

For example, one of the companies we work with, ContentFly, has 73 different zaps running their entire platform AND company. 73! They have more zaps than they have lines of code.

People underestimate the sheer amount of powerful tools that are available, all flawlessly efficient.

Slack and Zapier is where it all begins — Slack should be the command center of your operation, with Zapier being the pipes that bring all the other services in, allowing you to manage/monitor it from one place.

After that, it’s entirely up to you. Airtable is our weapon of choice, and Typeform is a great way of creating front-end or lead-in interfaces. Stripe & PayPal can handle your payments, while MailChimp and Intercom can automate customer marketing & communication.

If you aren’t using all of these touchpoints, in favor of just one catch-all system, you’re missing out on so much value. Each of these tools does their own specialization in a way that no catch-all will ever accomplish.

All told, we haven’t even brought up the best part of this: synergy.

By enabling multiple touchpoints, you can actually enhance the capabilities of each individual one. Zapier, for instance, has several Built-in Apps that let you format, filter & transform data before moving them from service to service.

You can literally automate everything.

Why give up that incredible power just to get hamstrung to a single tool? It’s an age-old mindset and a lazy one — if you aren’t aggressively fine-tuning your processes and building a machine that can scale, you’re planning your own obsolescence.

How it Works

There’s one question I get asked by entrepreneurs all the time:

What’s the most important thing I can invest my money and resources to make sure my business grows?

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve probably asked yourself the same. I know I have.

It always seems like there’s not enough money or time to allocate to all those important things. And that’s problem number one.

Problem number two is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that’s going to help every entrepreneur out there.

The answer depends on the stage your business is currently at.

If you’re running a 100k MRR business and spending 80% of it on overhead costs, you’re probably going to want to automate as many tasks as possible.

On the other hand, if you’re only starting out and your business is still your side hustle, you’re going to need to get profit to make it full-time. Fast.

9 Stages of Growth

We’re going to be using Alex Charfen’s data for different stages of entrepreneurial growth.

Alex sums up the process nicely. Each stage of your business’ growth needs different things, so responding to a question of what you should invest in now depends on what your business needs now.

Growing Your Side Hustle to a Business

This is the first stage of the entrepreneurial journey. Usually, before we reach the $100,000 mark, we’re still at the part-time mark and our businesses are side hustles we’re looking to grow.

The main thing to do at this stage is finding product-market fit.

What does this mean? Should you invest in tech?

No.

All you need to do at this stage is put out feelers and see how people (the market, your audience) respond to your idea.

Let’s say you’re developing a new product that’s going to help 20–30-year-olds develop their careers much faster than with traditional channels.

You need to get out there and tell them about your idea.

You need to talk to your audience and see whether they think it’s useful and whether they even understand why they need your product.

The best thing to invest your money and resources into at this stage is creating content.

Create content that’s going to reach and resonate with your audience. This can be blog posts, eBooks, videos, webinars — anything that adds more value.

Content is king, after all.

For example, I’m doing it with Facebook Lives to get in touch with the people who are my target audience, and to understand how I can develop my product to best serve their needs (product-market fit is all about that).

I’m still agile in my approach so I can change strategies and adapt my product to what my audience responds best to.

If you invest in tech at this stage, you’re still unsure of the product-market fit, and the chances of losing money by investing into the wrong thing are very high. It’s better to get in touch with your future customers and find the ones who need your product or educate them.

Of course, you can also add people to your mail list with tools like MailChimp which are free for up to 2,000 subscribers.

And this is another perk of creating awesome content — people will want to read more, they’ll want to stay informed on what you’re doing.

Promoting Your Ideas

When you’re at the $100,000 mark, that’s when you should start asking people if they’d like what you have to offer.

By then, you’ve gained their trust with valuable content.

And your main mission at this stage is spreading your voice, promoting your content even more until you’ve grown from $100,000 to $300,000.

If you want to invest in something when you’ve got quality foundations like the ones you’ve set with content, invest in technology that’s going to help you reach even more people.

Next Stop: Leveraged Sales

The next stop is definitely sales.

Sell as much as possible.

You’ve found the right kind of customers, motivated them with content, and it’s time to leverage that (and tech) to get sales.

If you’re doing it right, you may find that the best thing to invest in here is automating your sales process.

Why?

You want to be focusing on scaling your business and increasing sales, and you can’t do that if you’re still doing everything manually. That’s why we need some degree of automation to get leveraged sales.

Yes, I often talk about not needing CRM systems (customer relationship management systems) but they can be a good fit if you’ve got specific needs.

If you need something right now, improvise a CRM system to get leveraged sales with Trello and Zapier.

You can create corresponding boards with Trello, and automate the process with Zapier. The best thing is that you can get a lot of automation done with just free accounts.

For streamlining bookings and learning more about clients’ unique needs, check out Calendly.

At this stage of your business’ growth, you need to introduce some degree of automation to be able to generate even more revenue.

Creating Systems & Processes

Once you’re en route from $300,000 to $1 million, you can no longer say that you’ve got limited funds.

However, your needs change. You no longer need to push as hard on sales manually, or focus on getting your content out there.

What you need are systematization and processes.

You want to create systems and processes that reflect the methods that helped you reach this level of success. If you want to replicate them and use them to fuel your future growth, you need to make a system out of these behaviors and methods.

This is the point where you get a bit more into automation. You use software like Process Street to help you understand, organize and optimize your process and workflow.

You may also need more advanced communication systems to keep everything up and running successfully. Usually, entrepreneurs use Slack to communicate with their teams, and Intercom to communicate with customers.

The main goal of this stage is understanding what methods led you to success, and turning them into systems that will keep the machine going, bringing you even more revenue as you focus on different strategies.

Do We Need Tools to Grow as Entrepreneurs?

Honestly?

No.

You can reach your million in revenue without spending a single cent on tech, but it can be time-consuming. That’s why I encourage tech in moderate amounts to make the workload easier.

However, the main thing to remember is that you have to focus on things that bring immediate value and explain the benefits of your business for your potential customers.

After that, conversion becomes a piece of cake.

What It’s Like Now

Every week our small but mighty team gathers for a huddle call to check in about our monthly, weekly and daily goals and tasks.

If you’ve ever been to one of my Replaceable Founder Intensives, you know that we use Trello as our project management tool and as our focal point for weekly and monthly team meetings.

We sort the tasks assigned in Trello by team members and then each person gives an update on progress. It’s transparency and accountability in action. Every week. No excuses. So it’s not at all like this book club I used to go to where all we ever talked about is how we didn’t have time to read the book.

So, at this week’s meeting, Courtney our awesome COO shared her screen and the sorting and updating began, starting with her 25+ tasks. Then she shared what Joanna and The Amys are accountable for, and each of them had at least 20 tasks populating the screen. I love Trello for this; with each team member shuffle, the screen fills with a new assortment of color-coded “cards” that describe the array of responsibilities each team member is in charge of.

(And, of course, each of these responsibilities equates to critical things that move the growth of the business forward.)

Lots of responsibilities mean lots of cards on the screen in front of us.

Then Courtney came to me…

She shuffled the cards again to reveal my activities for the week and suddenly the screen went from covered with cards to cleaner than Marie Kondo’s kitchen counter.

I had TWO, that’s right TWO critical items assigned to me:

  1. Record a podcast episode.
  2. Transfer my profit sharing from the business account to my personal account.

Yup. That’s it. Record my thoughts and take money out of the bank. That’s all I had to do this week to keep the business moving forward.

This is how it’s been lately.

I am doing less and less as it relates to the minutiae of the operation of the business and doing more and more as it relates to me simply being, for lack of a better word, the Inventor.

These days I’m pretty much just showing up as “the talent” for the business. I give talks, I show up on podcasts and give interviews. I meet with potential partners to explore larger growth opportunities for the company.

Do you know why I’m able to do this?

Well, we all agreed it’s because I am getting out of the way. I’ve put systems and processes into place that work insanely well without me.

I have become replaceable.

Can I get a “Hell Yeah”?

And here’s the kicker . . .

We had our best profit month ever last month, all because I’ve been able to successfully get out of the way and let my team do what they do best.

The less I do, the better the company is performing.

Let me say that again so it really sinks in for you because I know this is sometimes a hard concept to grasp…

I’m the founder and CEO and our numbers are proving to us that the less I do, the better the company is performing.

This scenario has been the dream for me too for a long time. It’s taken a lot of trial and error to get us here, and we’re still ironing out the edges, but it works, this Methodology I created. I have become my own best case study.

Life Lessons Along The Way

Work-Life Balance is something that comes up all the time and I’ve said many times before that I do not believe in work-life balance.

I particularly like Alain deBotton’s treatment of this where he says that there is no such thing as work-life balance because anything that is worth pursuing will take us out of balance.

We try so hard all the time to make it so everything’s good and everything’s right and it always seems so fleeting…because it is. I think we need to accept that sometimes in some way for some period of time, there will be things in our life that don’t work well.

When you think about the things in your life, it could be your business, your friends, your family, your children, your parents, your physical health, whatever it might be. To think that we can have all those things in line is crazy and sets us up for failure.

We live in a society where success is celebrated relentlessly and ordinary achievement is completely overlooked; even though ordinary achievements are all around us all the time.

I got all four kids in snowsuits and boots in less than twenty minutes, last winter. I brought a plant back to life. I made peace with my Dad. What is amazing for one person is not realistic for another person and also not necessarily what amazing looks like for them.

As entrepreneurs, we put ourselves in uncomfortable situations on a regular basis. Comfort for us is a very bad thing. It makes us complacent, it makes us bored. In some cases, it makes us self sabotage and we can actively seek experiences that make us uncomfortable.

Life assures us time and time again, that it will go out of balance. But we have the chance to fix it, amend it, change it. There’s always something with which to tinker. Always.

Tech Helps

Here’s a link to our tech stack https://gumroad.com/l/ldfree/ldfree

So Does Inspiration

Best Advice I Got.

Lean into doubt.

I’m NOT talking about self-doubt. No way. That stuff sucks. Self-doubt is a lack of confidence, tanking self-esteem, and a negative, albeit, egotistical way of looking at the world. It translates into, “Well, I know I’m messing up, I’m not going to do the right thing, but the world still revolves around me and my decisions.” Toxic shit.

No, I’m talking about doubt as an agent of change. It can be a middle finger to the status quo and honest interrogation of why people around you “always do it this way.” The push back you’ll inevitably get from that heels dug in mentality should be your invitation to doubt even more.

If you question or doubt, a system, decision, policy or process which others are fully invested. If someone in a position of authority feels challenged by your doubt, stuff will get stirred up and brought out into the open.

In the words of my favorite Jurist, Louis Brandeis,

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants;”

Things will change. Now I’m not saying that they will always change for the better. We need to put ourselves in a position to do the work, question the thinking, offer alternatives, and let the results go.

It is how we build up our doubt muscle.

We do not attach ourselves to the outcome. We take pride in our investigation, in our curiosity, and our questioning. When we do this, we get better at the doubt game. Our questions become more pointed. We allow others to see the problems, not as something of their making, or their fault, but as an opportunity to get on the doubt train with you and develop more innovative solutions.

Where can you go to learn more?

Website: https://lessdoing.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arimeisel/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arimeisel

Twitter: https://twitter.com/arimeisel

How To Do Nothing Over The Holidays — a story about becoming replaceable

Did I catch you working on a holiday? I know. It happens. We say, “I’m unplugging” or “No way I’m checking emails or doing work.”

But here we are — I’m writing a blog post and you’re reading it.

I carved out a little time this morning, before the kids wake up, to share a really cool story with you. So here goes:

Every week our small but mighty team gathers for a huddle call to check in about our monthly, weekly and daily goals and tasks.

If you’ve ever been to one of my Replaceable Founder Intensives, you know that we use Trello as our project management tool and as our focal point for weekly and monthly team meetings.

We sort the tasks assigned in Trello by team member and then each person gives an update on progress. It’s transparency and accountability in action. Every week. No excuses. So it’s not at all like this book club I used to go to where all we ever talked about is how we didn’t have time to read the book.

So, at this week’s meeting, Courtney our awesome COO shared her screen and the sorting and updating began, starting with her 25+ tasks.

Then she shared what Joanna and The Amys are accountable for, and each of them had at least 20 tasks populating the screen. I love Trello for this; with each team member shuffle, the screen fills with a new assortment of color-coded “cards” that describe the array of responsibilities each team member is in charge of.

(And, of course, each of these responsibilities equates to critical things that move the growth of the business forward.)

Lots of responsibilities mean lots of cards on the screen in front of us.

Then Courtney came to me…

She shuffled the cards again to reveal my activities for the week and suddenly the screen went from covered with cards to cleaner than Marie Kondo’s kitchen counter.

I had TWO, that’s right TWO critical items assigned to me:

  1. Record a podcast episode.
  2. Transfer my profit sharing from the business account to my personal account.

Yup. That’s it. Record my thoughts and take money out of the bank. That’s all I had to do this week to keep the business moving forward.

This is how it’s been lately.

I am doing less and less as it relates to the minutiae of the operation of the business and doing more and more as it relates to me simply being, for lack of a better word, the Inventor.

These days I’m pretty much just showing up as “the talent” for the business. I give talks, I show up on podcasts and give interviews. I meet with potential partners to explore larger growth opportunities for the company.

Do you know why I’m able to do this?

Well, we all agreed it’s because I am getting out of the way. I’ve put systems and processes into place that work insanely well without me.

I have become replaceable.

Can I get a “Hell Yeah”?

And here’s the kicker . . .

We had our best profit month ever last month, all because I’ve been able to successfully get out of the way and let my team do what they do best.

The less I do, the better the company is performing.

Let me say that again so it really sinks in for you because I know this is sometimes a hard concept to grasp…

I’m the founder and CEO and our numbers are proving to us that the less I do, the better the company is performing.

If you’re anything like our clients (which I’m guessing you are, because you probably wouldn’t be following me if you weren’t), then you probably see this scenario that I just described as the dream for you and your company.

And you know what? This scenario has been the dream for me too for a long time. It’s taken a lot of trial and error to get us here, and we’re still ironing out the edges, but it works, this Methodology I created. I have become my own best case study.

If you’d like to take a huge first step toward having this kind of freedom, why not join me in New York at my Replaceable Founder Intensives? I’ll only be teaching them LIVE three times this year. Take two minutes right now to secure a spot. Go to: less.do/nyc

And then, this time next year, I guarantee you won’t find yourself in the Target parking lot checking your emails while your kids pull on your hoodie, reminding you that you said, you weren’t going to be on your phone on vacation; wondering how you’re ever going to get out from under all the responsibilities you have foisted upon yourself.

You’ll be doing what you want, picking out LEGOs you’re gonna want to build and marveling at how big your kids seem to have gotten overnight. And you’ll be at peace.

Happy Replaceability Day!

If you want to become more replaceable, check out my free mini-course that teaches you the three main components. REPLACE YOURSELF

It’s Not Urgent. Really.

The world is waiting for you to interact with it, twenty-four hours a day.

While that may seem grandiose or idealistic, the truth is no matter what the information is, where it’s coming from, or who is sending it, you can control the way that you perceive it, process it and receive it.

I’d like to help you separate the urgent from the non-urgent in your business and develop an effective system of communication for your team and your customers that fits seamlessly into your workflow.

Asynchronous communication may be the answer.

It means you’re going to have to start talking to yourself a lot more because this type of connection is not a two-way street. It is not live or directly with another human being. You may think that sounds robotic and insensitive, but structuring your communication system this way allows you to become more authentic, inspired and productive.

The tools we use must feel like they belong to us; that we can then use them however we like. Email, for example, is treated by many as a “To Do” list we fill out for other people. It’s a mistake to allow a tool to tether us to the world. I think email is the greatest productivity tool ever invented, but I don’t let people use it against me.

If you’re working a nine to five job with particular requirements around that, it may not be within your control. Still, you can make adjustments to your approach that will make your work life a whole lot smoother.

Just because we have email doesn’t mean that somebody can get to you whenever he or she wants. Moreover, just because somebody wants you to respond to them urgently, it’s hardly ever necessary.

Nothing that is truly urgent, should come through email.

If somebody is emailing you something critical, then it’s not urgent. In other words, if you got hit by a car, you wouldn’t send an email letting your husband know.

I like to say as founders, we don’t want to spend our days putting out fires. Granted, fires appear in the businesses we run, but that’s not how we should be set up. We want to build a fireproof building and what that requires is a little bit of planning and a little bit of understanding about where information should go and how to sort it out most effectively.

The first piece of the puzzle is separating internal from external.

So internal and external communications are indeed not the same, and it’s usually why most inboxes are so overwhelming. External email tends to be very transactional, like communication with customers or clients, vendors or with outsiders.

“How long does it take you to ship these items?”

“It takes ten days.” or

“Can we set up a meeting?”

“Yes, and here are the times that we can do it.”

Now internal communication tends to be more collaborative, more discussion-based. The reason that email stinks for this kind of conversation is that discussion is utterly ineffective when we have BCCs, forwards and CCs in twenty emails. It’s a chain letter where you have no idea to whom you are even talking, and someone invariably goes off on an unrelated topic with its own set of asides.

I was sitting at a birthday party last weekend with my six-year-olds, and one of the dads noticed that I was using Voxer. (my preferred asynchronous form of communication. It’s a next-level walkie-talkie). He asked me about it, and I told him. He said, “Oh, that’s funny. Here’s what I use at the UN. I use Viber for talk to the EU; I use Signal to talk domestically and Telegram for our missions in Asia. They are all incredibly secure but only for a particular region.” It was so amazing to me. First of all that that these platforms were so secure and also that he had separate tools for separate kinds of communication.

You mentally switch when you’re using a different tool for different kinds of communication.

We need that compartmental approach because if you have everything in one place, you have to continually reset yourself, to accommodate to the different scenarios that come up. So some of the things you have to consider when you’re separating out the various forms of communication are time zones and locations. In my former business, I had people in 17 times zones. It required an exceptional kind of planning and a clear company-wide understanding of what constituted “URGENT.”

It is a big dilemma for many people. I subscribe to the Abraham Lincoln’s idea of “Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today,” but that’s not the same thing as being urgent. Urgent to me is when something is life-threatening; something that will end the business if it’s not dealt with it right now.

Now, you might say that excellent customer service requires urgency. I disagree.

Urgency to me implies poor planning.

Think about that for a second. Urgency suggests poor planning. Now, of course, we cannot plan for everything, but not everything we believe to be urgent actually is.

We need to do two things — get better at planning and stop getting frenetic in “right now” situations. Yes, it may need to be dealt with right now, but that doesn’t mean it is urgent. So if it’s not urgent, it doesn’t even need to be discussed right now.

Also, remember that what may be urgent to one person is not necessarily crucial to the other. It’s called “correspondence bias.”

It’s a well-documented psychological state where you take somebody’s behavior at the moment, and you apply it to their entire persona. Any behavior after that moment reinforces your point-of-view. The best example of this is you’re driving down the highway, and some person comes flying up and cuts you off. You think, “What that jerk.” You’ll honk, try to cut them off, grumble or be angry because you’re assuming that person did not just ACT like a jerk but IS a jerk.

However, what if they were on the way to the hospital because their wife was in labor?

In other words, the sense of urgency is perspective based. If you have something go wrong with a client, somebody who works for you might think, “Oh, it’s urgent that I get this to the boss and figure this out.”

Their urgency is driven by their assumptions about how you operate as a founder and their own place in the organization based on past experience. You can avoid this by setting guidelines and allowing people the space to solve their problems.

When a person feels empowered, urgency dissipates.

So what’s urgent and what’s not? A former partner asked me what would constitute an emergency to me. The only thing I could think of was if somebody emptied our bank accounts. Urgent. General customer requests? Non-urgent. Brainstorming new initiatives? Important, but not urgent.

My business has been up and running for a little over two years now. We’ve grown fast and made all kinds of fundamental changes to our business model. We’ve never once had an urgent matter arise.

Not once.

The Toxic Brew of Boredom and Entrepreneurs — and how to remedy it.

I was talking to one of our Less Doing Leaders yesterday and she was saying how she was feeling really negative, but couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from. Her business is maturing. She has a solid team. All data points toward a great year.

But it was her tone. It seemed flat. I said, “Wow, you sound really bored”. She said, “You know what? You’re right. I just said that to my husband. I’m feeling uninspired and bored.”

So it happens to all of us. I was secretly relieved.

Boredom is really bad for entrepreneurs, because when we’re bored, we make bad decisions. We take unnecessary risks just so we can feel something.

In Driven, by Doug Brackmann he talks about the entrepreneur as an “evolutionary irritant.” In other words, we have to mess things up so that we can fix them and make them better. BTW, this short quiz of his will give you a better idea of how evolutionarily irritating you are.

So, if there’s nothing in our immediate environment to mess with, we’ll tinker with ourselves. This can lead to all kinds of destructive behavior masked as self-improvement. Here’s a great read from The New Yorker, called, “Improving Ourselves To Death”.

Be Careful What You Wish For

As I have made myself more replaceable at Less Doing, using my very own Methodology, yes I have less to do. Yes, the company is running really well without me. Yes, my system obviously works. But the fallout from experiencing this level of success is not what I expected.

I get bored, and it’s terrible. Here’s Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach’s ™ take on why this happens. He, as always, has some very sage advice.

So, the good news is, instead of looking for parts of my business I can screw up so I can fix, irritating my team and my clients, I’ve decided to simply become aware that this pattern of behavior no longer serves me. (or anyone else).

I found some great advice in an article called, “Is it Burnout or Boredom?” In Entrepreneur magazine.

  1. Fuel a new work challenge. — Go after a project that seems beyond your current reach.
  2. Change your dull-as-butter-knife routine — Get a change of scenery by working somewhere else. Pick a rando spot on a map, pack up your laptop and go.
  3. Marry your mission all over again — Return to your original passion to gain perspective on why it might not be a good fit any longer or how you lost your connection to it.

Replaceable Founders like me would do well to initiate another, healthier operating system when it comes to how we use all the free time we’ve worked so hard to enjoy.

What’s your plan?

Don’t Procrastinate, Delegate

“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Those four simple words will absolutely devastate your productivity.

The average person’s life is littered with projects that never get finished simply because they were never actually started. Procrastination is to blame.

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, seasoned CEO, or stay-at-home parent — procrastination is going to be your #1 hurdle to success.

In order to make the absolute MOST out of your day, you’re going to need to do one very important thing.

DELEGATE.

Delegate everything you don’t truly need to do yourself — trust me, more things fit under that umbrella than you realize…no less than 90% of your day can be delegated to someone else.

Is delegation without its flaws? Absolutely not. But those flaws are far and few between compared to the stress, disorganization, and overwhelm associated with procrastination.

Delegation can come in a variety of forms depending upon your situation. For me, delegation comes almost exclusively in the form of my team here at Less Doing. They help me navigate around the common triggers of procrastination

  • Boredom
  • Lack of motivation
  • Distraction
  • Overwhelm
  • Uncertainty of success

…and help me get things done. Are those completed tasks always perfect? Not always, but at least they’re a step in the right direction, a building block to something better.

If you refer to the above graphic, you’ll get a good visual sense of the levels of delegation. There is not one optimal approach and the level at which you delegate will depend on the task. A good way to begin using this strategy is by applying it to your inbox. Ask yourself, “Do I need to do this now? Can it wait? Can someone else handle it? Once you have determined those parameters, you can figure out how involved you need to be in the process. If your work environment is built on mutual respect, and you’re willing to give your ego a rest, you’ll be amazed at how little you actually have to oversee.

More importantly, when delegating all excess in my day, I’m creating the mental and physical space necessary to work on what I’m fantastic at — being a husband, father, and helping other people improve their lives.

As you start to get more comfortable with delegation, you’ll slowly notice your schedule freeing up as your day becomes less mired in the tasks other people can do. You’ll also notice that, as you prepare tasks for delegation, your focus will sharpen — you’ll start thinking and working ON your business, rather than IN it.

You’ll enjoy the headspace to honestly evaluate the state of your business (or your life) and where you want to go next. When you’re ready to make the leap from delegation amateur to delegation aficionado, be sure to employ tools that will increase your efficiency, including:

  • Trello — the best workflow and project management tool out there
  • Slack — a bastion of highly-effective asynchronous communication
  • Evernote and Dropbox — cloud-based tools that allow you to store and share anything and everything surrounding your delegation
  • Voxer — The greatest way to communicate with your team

When you start investing in delegation you’ll begin to find the focus, flexibility, and freedom that may have eluded you until now. Yay!

Productivity Routines Debunked

I came across this article the other day. “22 Power Routines that will Boost your Productivity.” Well, that got my attention. And away we go…

1. Wake up when it’s right for you.

I think we can train ourselves to do pretty much anything, and yes, some of us are not morning people, some of us have different circadian rhythms. But you can hack your wake up time by picking a time to go to sleep. The easiest way to do that is you take the average number of REM cycles, which for most people is about 90 minutes and add those up.

The average person takes 14 minutes to fall asleep. So if you get four cycles, that’s six hours plus 14 minutes. So you want to go to sleep, six hours and 14 minutes before you want to wake up. While that sounds very nitpicky or trivial, it actually does work.

It’s also not reasonable. If I’m really motivated, I’ll wake up at 5:00 AM and I’ll start doing things. Otherwise I’m gonna wake up when a kid wakes me up. I don’t really have a morning routine because I have my kids. Now people with kids certainly can have morning routines, but I think that it makes it significantly more difficult.

2. Stay away from your phone when you first wake up.

No. No. No. No. It’s akin to the idea that if you’re an alcoholic and you lock up your liquor, you’ll stop drinking. It doesn’t solve the problem. Preventing ourselves from looking at our phones doesn’t necessarily fix anything. I believe that if you’re in control of your communications and you know what you’re doing and you have a good system set up, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t or wouldn’t want to look at your phone first thing in the morning.

I look at it first thing and it takes me about a minute and a half, two minutes to catch up on anything that might’ve come in overnight, maybe a couple of emails, maybe a couple of Slack messages if that, and that’s it.

3. Eat breakfast.

Don’t agree with that one either. I have been doing intermittent fasting for the past four months now. I’ve lost 13 pounds. I’ve had significant increases in my cognitive functioning. I’m not snacking or eating all day. My first meal is typically around 11 o’clock or 12. So one thing is you could say that breakfast is just your first meal of the day and you want to make that really great, but I don’t think that you have to eat breakfast to get your day going.

4. Move Your Body

I think that it’s a good idea to get your body moving. But that can mean different things to different people. That could mean a good little five-minute yoga stretch when you get out of bed. It could mean doing 10 pushups and 10 jumping jacks when you get out of bed in the morning. Movement gets things going and it helps shake off the nighttime heaviness,

5. Meditation and Stillness

I do agree with this one. I don’t necessarily agree that you have to meditate. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t meditate. What I’m saying is that you don’t have to do traditional meditation for this to be effective. Stillness I think is more interesting. On those mornings when I wake up early, like 5:00 AM, I will definitely spend five or 10 minutes just sitting with my own thoughts, not looking at my phone, not doing anything else and just sitting. It’s very, very difficult for most people, myself included.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

6. Make your bed.

I think that making your bed is the key to a good morning. It sets you up for the day and there’s nothing better than getting into a made bed in the evening.

7. Recite affirmations.

I would love to tell you that if you stood in the morning in the mirror every morning and said, “Hey, I’m going to be so productive today.” “You are a productive person.”, ou would magically become more productive. I know that there’s research that shows that it works, but I don’t think that they’re quite as exacting or linear. It can’t hurt, but It’s not a guarantee. Productivity takes action, not just affirmations.

8. Get Your Brain Going

This is the movement version of your brain. I usually read one of two newsletters that come in in the morning; Morning Brew and Next Draft. I get a quick overview of what’s coming up in terms of the world and politics and news. Both help me think about something outside of myself.

9. Schedule your time.

So this is a very personal choice, but I think scheduling your time is something that should be done at night. In fact, it should happen on Sunday night. You should be looking at both the week ahead and the day ahead. One of the goals that you should have is to CANCEL at least one thing that you have planned for that week. Saying no more is a good habit to get into. Don’t do it rudely or superficially, have a good reason, but pick something on your calendar that just doesn’t need to be there and cancel it. I think that doing it in the morning is not as efficient and effective as doing it at night. I think it gives you more time to really digest what you’re gonna be doing the next day.

10. Pare down your decisions.

I live and die by the calendar. If it’s not in the calendar, it’s not happening. Reduce the number of things upon which you decide. And as always, implement the three DS that we teach here at Less Doing. Do. Delete. Defer.

11. Dress for Success.

I think that dressing for comfort is far more important. Of course, it depends on what you’re doing, but generally, dress for the mode that you want to be in is going to drastically improve your productivity. Dressing in a suit is not going to make you more productive. Dressing in something that hinders your ability to get things done is pretty counterproductive.

12. Put pen to paper.

There is a lot of really great research that says that putting a pen to paper is neurologically more effective. It’s all about strengthening the connection between our brains and our hands. My handwriting is terrible. I think I should work on this.

13. Eat that damn frog.

They say, “eat the frog.” In other words, do the most difficult thing first and everything else gets easier. Wrong. The difficult thing may not match up with the timing of your day. Let’s say the most difficult thing of your day may be writing a blog post. But let’s say your writing time is best done between 2:00 and 4:00 PM. So if you try to do it first thing in the morning, you’re not going to be able to be as effective at it. What you should be doing first thing in the morning is getting rid of the thing which is slowing you down the most. Identify the places where you are a bottleneck in your business or in a task where you’re holding other people up That should be your number one priority, not the hardest thing.

14. Focus on yourself.

If you don’t schedule your time, your time will be scheduled for you. So you do need to make time for yourself. Pretty much, 80% of your time should be spent on active recovery and 20% should be spent on work. So you work super effectively in that smaller amount of time, the rest of the time is spent on rest, recovery, learning, and improvement. It’s active recovery, not in the athletic sense, but in the sense of doing things that really enrich you, spending time with your family, or working on a hobby.

15. Practice Gratitude.

Practicing gratitude and being more cognizant of the things that are happening in our lives affects everything. Oftentimes as human beings we tend to focus on the negative and we don’t even recognize the positive.

16. Celebrate

We need to celebrate our successes and socialize with our teammates. There’s actually some really interesting research that shows that virtual teams are more socialized than non-virtual teams because they make more of an effort. It’s like when you never see those friends that live right next door, but you see the friends that live out of town more often.

17.Set hard time limits on certain activities.

Yes, 100%. If you set artificially restrictive limits on yourself, you will get more done. It’s quite simply the way it will work. Parkinson’s law says that work expands to fill the time allotted to complete it. Give yourself less time to complete things.

There was this great study done on the finishing times of marathons. It took the finishing times of over a million people. What they found was that there was a huge uptick every half hour, because everyone wanted to get in under that time marker. It just shows you the arbitrary nature of most goals that we set. We can set any goals that we want so we might as well set more restrictive ones.

18. Organize your workspace.

Having an organized workspace is really important. Your environment plays a big role in how productive you’re going to be. So organize it for the work you need to do and keep in mind anything that we make 20 seconds more difficult to do will be easier to break up a habit. So if you want to drink more water, have more water at your workstation, if you don’t want to eat junk food, don’t have junk food in your house, organize your workspace,

19. Leave work at work.

This one is a little bit more difficult for entrepreneurs particularly, and also those who work remotely or work at home. It’s a little bit hard sometimes to have that separation and compartmentalize. It helps to have your environment set up for work only. So I wouldn’t recommend that you sometimes do work in the kitchen and sometimes do work in the dining room. You want to have one place where you do at least the same kind of work. Maybe you always write in one place and you always read one place. What this compartmentalization does is create a signal for your brain that this is the place where you’re doing that kind of work. It will make it a lot easier to switch activities.

20. Check-in with a coach or mentor.

This may sound self-serving. I am a coach. Still, accountability is often best done outside of ourselves. Checking in with a coach or mentor takes the thoughts out of your head and allows someone with experience to help.

21.Reflect on the day’s achievements.

We don’t put enough importance on the good things that we get done. And there’s this great tool called [inaudible] this, which sends you an email at the end of the day and it says, what’d you get done today? And you write back and it creates a journal from it. And oftentimes when I would get that at six o’clock at night, I would have to look at my calendar for the day to figure out and remember the things that I had done over the past eight or nine hours because there’s just so much happening and it’s so easy again, for us to focus on the negative that sometimes we really need to celebrate those successes.

22. Disengage.

At some point in the day, you need to “close the kitchen”. Like right now. I’ve been writing for a long time. I can feel my productivity waning. So I’m going to disengage.

Make it an effective day!