Success Hack: Buy Dog Food on Amazon

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Before we get into it today, I just would like to start by asking everyone if you've enjoyed the the past 30+ episodes that we've done. We put them out every single weekday, 5 to 10 minutes. Many of you have been listening to every one, and I so appreciate it. If you are loving it, if you're enjoying it, please leave us a review, if it's 5-star, of course. If it's not, no, I'm just kidding. If you could leave us a review, that would be awesome. Also, if you wouldn't mind sharing it, any of the episodes that have made a difference in your world. If you would share it, I'd love it. It would mean a lot. Let's actually get into our topic today. Today is going to be a fun one. We're going to be talking about creating more time and space in your world, and it's going to be built around some advice given to me by my mentor: buy your dog food on Amazon. Now, what the hell does that mean? I have a mentor of mine over the years who has taught me so much and shared with me so many different strategies in life and business and truly made me, I think, just a better person overall. And some of the most meaningful advice he ever gave to me was saying, "Brian, you need to buy dog food on Amazon." Now, what was he saying? What did he mean? Right? Now, he didn't literally mean buy dog food on Amazon. But he also was using that as an example of all of the things that we could figure out a way to minimize time or involvement, yet we still go about and do. Like, for example, dog food. As silly as this may sound, I drive, or used to drive, to PetSmart, and every, I don't know, month or two, buy another bag or two of dog food. Now, I didn't mind it all that much. It wasn't that big of a deal, I guess, but the truth is it was an hour-plus trip to take, and I would drive there, and I'd buy it, and I'd load this 40-pound bag up, which is a pain in the ass, and I'd bring it home, and I drop it in the pantry, and we now have dog food. Now, why am I talking about that? Well, he brought it up. He said, "Listen, Brian, just buy your dog food on Amazon." Why? Well, because that was an hour of my life that could have been spent working or reading or better yet spending time with my family or doing something I truly enjoy. Now, if I saw it as a break in my life to go take an hour to go get it, by all means, great. But I didn't. I actually saw it as a chore. And he said, why would you go do that when you could just literally order it off your phone and in 3 days or less it's going to show up at your front door? It's a great point. How many things are you doing right now that take you 10 minutes, half hour, hour, maybe 2 hours, maybe even longer, that with a click of a button you you could have all of that time back. Many of you are great about this. You think about it all the time. But then others like me, it doesn't cross our mind. We just get in the car and we go. It's just crazy to think about. My wife, she— while she goes to the grocery store from time to time, she uses things like Instacart now regularly. I know many of you do. Now, some of you enjoy walking through the aisles. She does not. That hour that it would take, or 2 hours if she was loading up our house with food, going up and down the aisles, it wasn't something she looked forward to. Leveraging things like that bought her back all this time, and more importantly, peace of mind. So how do we go about— like, what are the steps for us to really start to maximize our leverage? Here's, here's what I believe we need to be doing. Number 1, I think you got to get super clear on your dollar per hour in business. Like, if you're an entrepreneur and you're running the company, okay, great, you don't get a W-2 wage or you don't get paid hourly, you can still calculate it. So what is your dollar per hour in business? What's your ROI on time with your family or friends or other experiences? I want you to figure out that math equation. Because based on that math, you can make much more educated decisions around the next thing I'm about to say, which is hiring for things or delegating or using technology or spending a few extra bucks to buy back your time. An example of this, we can clean our house, right? Like full transparency, it costs, I don't know, $150 every time our house cleaners come. We can go and do that work ourselves, my wife, me, get the girls, make it a family event, but none of us like to do it. Sure, we clean up, but I'm talking about like the deep cleaning. We don't want to spend 4 hours as a family doing that. I would rather spend 4 hours working on something that generates our family money income or working on, uh, something that increases our knowledge. Helps us grow, or maybe just something fun. And I, I'm clear on what my dollar per hour is. I'm clear on the value of us spending time. And I could tell you, for the 4 hours it would take, which would be— what is that math? Uh, $35 an hour, let's call it, for $150. You know, it's a little— I think it's a little off, but $35 an hour. It's well worth the spend. Now, what— where would it not be well worth the spend? If I employed somebody to do that and then accomplish nothing with those 4 hours. Another example of things we can do to better leverage our time. I am the type of guy, I am an individual that takes Uber everywhere, and I don't mean just like Uber to the airport, I mean Uber to appointments. Some days, many days in a row, I don't drive. I will take an Uber. Now it costs money to take Uber or Lyft or whatever your preferred service is, but while I'm riding in that car, I'm actually able to look at my email or look at my texts or read whatever it is I need to read. And I'm getting back the 15, 20, 30 minutes that I wouldn't have if I in fact was driving. Now, if I have 2 or 3 appointments in a day and each one of those rides takes me half an hour, I am now getting an hour and a half of work time back, of focus time back by not actually driving. And to me, that's worth a lot of money. And to you it is too. Even if your wage is relatively low, I could assure you, you probably offset the cost of that drive if in fact you're able to work on things that matter to you financially. The last thing that I do, and I know this is not something everybody can do, but For those that personally know me or have my number, you've probably noticed that I have no voicemail. Like, literally don't have my voicemail system set up. That's not an accident, and if some of you are hearing this for the first time and you're like, and you've texted me before, Brian, your voicemail's not set up, I'm aware, I know it's not set up, but why do I do that? Well, 'cause the truth of the matter is, if anybody needs to get ahold of me, they either keep calling or they text me. And what I found with the quantity of voicemails I used to get, I would not only spend time going through them, I'd spend a lot of time stressing that I haven't called people back. Silly, it may sound silly to you, but the truth of the matter is that's leverage for me. That's buying my time back. That's owning my calendar. That's my version in business of buying my dog food on Amazon. So the focusing question for you today, Where are you losing time by doing things inefficiently, and what steps can you take to change that? How can you get more productivity out of your days in business or in life? And how do you start spending time— how do you create more time to do the things you'd rather be doing, the things you'd rather be focusing on? Going back to a recent episode, we're going to be known for 1 or 2 things in our lifetime. That means we got to dedicate more time to those things, more focus to those things. So what leverage can you create that gives you back your time so you can focus? That's all we have for today, the No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.