You're Wasting Your Life (Here's How To Fix It)

Google is offering free AI training and tools to U.S. small businesses so they can innovate in ways both big and small. Built by Google experts, the Google AI Professional Certificate equips small businesses with practical AI skills. Through hands-on projects, they can start using AI to get more done and unlock new opportunities for their business. This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at grow.google/business.

Most people treat buying back their time like a reward. That is completely backwards. Buying back your time isn't what you do once you're rich. It's actually how you get rich. So today I'm going to prove that the story is wrong and show you exactly how to buy back your time hour by hour. We're going to get the dollar per hour math that decides what to offload first. Then I have this 3-person hiring ladder tied to your revenue and a framework called the 4 Ds that stops your calendar from filling up with everybody else's priorities. I've basically started, bought, and sold more businesses than I can count, and every Every one of them taught me the same thing. Time is the only asset you can't make more of. So let's get yours back. I'm Codie Sanchez and this is The Big Deal Podcast. Let's jump in. Really quick, right before we get into it, if the show has ever saved you an hour or made you a dollar, do me one favor and hit subscribe. It tells YouTube and Spotify that this show is exactly what people like you need, and it's genuinely the biggest thing you can do to help us keep making it. Okay, let's get into the episode. Part 1. I have only met 2 humans ever who valued their time so highly they didn't let a single task in that wasn't high value. And they were both billionaires and happy and married and actually had good kids too. Well, actually 3, 3 of them were. Bill Perkins was one too. And he told me that he wouldn't invest in one of my companies if I kept getting my own gas for my car, which at the time I was like, Bill, What are you talking about? I'm not too good to get gas, right? Like, get over yourself. And he was like, wow, you still have a poor person's mindset. Just because you do a task or don't do it doesn't mean you're too good for it. And then he said, who said anything about being good or bad? Maybe you're also bad at getting gas and you're giving somebody else the opportunity to do it. And that was actually fascinating because that was the slap in the face that I needed. The point basically is that buying back your time is not necessarily about you being better than tasks. It's about spending the on the one asset you can't make more of, your time, on the few things that you are actually best suited to do. Now, let me tell you, the fastest way to waste your time is to insist on doing everything yourself. There's actually a sentence that has cost, I think, more people and entrepreneurs more money than pretty much any recession. If I don't do it myself, it won't get done right. Come on, you've said it to yourself, right? I want to actually tell you why you're so wrong. So it's not just Codie yelling at you. There are studies after studies, but there's this one by Gallup that found that the CEOs who delegate best pull in 33% more revenue than the ones who don't. So before you decide you're the only person on earth who can do something, ask yourself a question: is the story I'm telling myself actually true? Like, do you really think the person you'd hire would write a worse email, like take a worse note or make a worse call than you immediately? I don't know, probably, probably not. And even if they do, is it okay? Because you can then do 50 times more things. I think what feels like unteachable instinct is usually just a set of rules you've never written down. So let's try it. Before you assume you're a totally irreplaceable email writer, challenge yourself. Write down the 5 rules you actually follow. I don't know, tone, length, structure, words or phrases to avoid, and how you sign off. If you really put your best effort into that, you'll find that that unteachable instinct is just a one-page doc and a $20 an hour assistant who runs 80% as well as you. And if you spend 10 minutes editing their drafts instead of an hour writing each day, you'll find that 80% will get to 90% and above pretty quickly. So 30 focused days of onboarding, training, and critiquing that assistant will literally change your schedule forever. You'll find that 30 days isn't actually that hard at all. An assistant is actually where I've always started. I start with a virtual assistant. I actually use this company called Athena, and they totally changed my life when it came to assistants because they taught me how to train my assistant. And then when I was bad at something and the assistant thus was bad at it, they gave me a better way to do it. And so I would say on average, I've probably had 6 assistants during my career that were either in-person or virtual, and they just keep getting better and better and better because the training compounds over time. So I'll tell you a hard truth, which is you will never make millions doing everything yourself. You'll just basically stay a very busy, very tired person who happens to own the company. And I don't actually think you should be your busiest employee ever. And the second part about this is that you can then buy the hours back. So here's where you should start. Look at your calendar, find the cheapest hours, the ones you can buy back for almost nothing. And I like to think about this like running every task through one filter, the dollar per hour rule. So I want you to set a price for every task you do. If you'd happily pay someone $20 an hour to do it and an hour of your real attention is worth $100, then doing that task yourself sets $80 on fire, basically. And let's ground this for a second. Let's say you spend 5 hours a week on inbox triage, on grocery runs, on booking your own travel. That's $500 of your time every week spent on work. That's a $20 an hour assistant that should do it better than you because they're also not running a company. They're also maybe not the head of the family. Also, you could Instacart, so you're paying a $400 an hour premium every week. And once that math clicks, the question flips from, can I afford to help? To why am I still doing this? And what else could I be doing with my time that would have a higher value dollar to me? So the first assignment, I got one for you. I want you to run a weekly time audit, just 7 days. Write down every task you do in 30-minute blocks. And if this is too much, try it for 24 hours. Then at the end of 24 hours or week, price every block using the dollar per hour rule. Really? Like, is there any reason why you can't do that? I don't think so. Just start with 24 hours. I can almost guarantee that in 7 days you'll find 10 hours of easily replaceable work on your calendar every week, and in a day you'll probably find 1 to 2. Then once you've done that, run every cheap block through my 4 Ds: delete, defer, delegate, do. Delete is the most important one. It's like, how many of the things that you do don't even need to happen at all? Kill the standing meeting that kind of is useless anyway. Defer. Does it need to happen right now? Could you batch it into a block instead of letting it interrupt you 5 times a day and then having context switching, which is super expensive? Then you go to delegating. Can anyone else do this 80% as well? Hand it off with written rules. This is super important. Also remember, as you become the boss, you can hand off meetings. I do that all the time. Do, only what survives the first 3. If you survive the first 3 Ds, then it gets into your hands. I want you to really pay attention to the order here. Most people start at delegate and end up paying someone to do work that should have never been done in the first place. So remember, always delete first, then defer, then delegate, then do. The next thing I want you to think about, I call build your ladder. So a very successful friend of mine once told me, I don't take anyone seriously who doesn't have an assistant. I thought that was weird. Elitist, maybe? And then he explained, if they don't put extreme value on their time, how are they going to value mine or my money? And this makes a lot of sense because he was literally like, I'm giving somebody money. And if that money, if I'm giving somebody $100,000 and they use that money to do tasks that a $20 an hour assistant could be doing, I'm lighting some of my money on fire. And so that reframed everything for me. If you don't value your own time, nobody else is going to. So let's talk about how to actually build that support. There's a really simple acronym for freeing up your time. And I love acronyms because they're trainable. So now you can take these and train your team. I call it FREE, Favors, Remote, Executive, Envoy. So favors basically means soft power and it's completely free. This is your ability to get people to genuinely want to help you. Like you do the favors, you write the thank yous, you be the person that other people are relying on. Some of the most effective people I've ever worked with had zero direct reports, like literally zero. They just knew that being helpful made others want to help them, and thus they could delegate. So remember, before you can afford to delegate down to somebody you pay, can you just delegate sideways by becoming the person other people actually want to go to bat for? So do favors for others, have them do them for you. R is for remote. This is your remote assistant, virtual assistant. It's actually a thing. A remote assistant can help with anything repeatable and rules-based. So like inbox scheduling, data entry, research. For almost anyone running a business, it's the highest leverage hire you're not making. Also, by the way, I do not yet believe in replacing this with AI. You can supplement, but having a human is so important. I have remote assistants throughout my company. My content team has one. My sales team uses them. My accounting team has one. I personally have have one, and I think that in your business it's underrated. Like, here's an example. We have a big project coming up, and I used our company I told you about, Athena, to hire a dedicated remote executive assistant for it too. I really like this company. I've used them to hire remote executive assistants. They pair me with a full-time assistant, and if you've never had one before, they'll teach you how and what to delegate. Total game changer. So for this project, in just the first week, they single-handedly took the project from my notes and ideas to off the ground. You know, Gabriel is our assistant. He built trackers, timelines. He's working backwards to make sure things are falling to hit benchmarks along the way. So Athena hires from basically this huge pool of offshore applicants. Gabriel lives in the Philippines, but I work 12-hour days. And candidly, I can always count on him being there. He works harder than most people I know in the US. And you know what I didn't expect? He project manages me. Like sometimes he will look at like me or my head's to-do list, and if it takes less than 5 minutes, he'll just have you do it right now, or he'll have you hold yourself accountable to the to-do list so it doesn't grow. It's not easy to boss the boss, but I actually love it. So this position is even more critical now that I'm pregnant. It's like I have nutrition and protein goals, like pre-approved meals go to my office to keep me on track, not reaching for a protein bar to eat. You know, when I'm on a busy day, having food show up is super critical. I just told my team today that we found that hiring a remote assistant has 10K better ROI for my company than using AI., and that's where people get stuck. I think deciding to get help is easy, but actually finding someone generally great is hard. So Athena's incredible for this. If you're ready to find a remote executive assistant, you can actually go to Athena.com and start now. Now, E is for executive, and it refers to your in-person executive assistant. An EA handles what a remote person physically cannot, and usually they're a little bit more sophisticated. So this is like flagging you when a meeting runs over time, running point on your day as it moves, sitting in for you in meetings. But those small things added up will save you many, many headaches. I mean, my executive assistant's name is Sarah, and I have her and Paula, my virtual assistant. And the reason I have both of them is because I want one always working on things somebody remote can do. And then I want the other one checking in on me, checking in on the team, and what we call eyes to eyes, going around to people in your company or life and being like, hey, did you get that done? Hey, can I have that document? Hey, can you print this off for me? Hey, can you drive me somewhere? The second E is for Envoy. This is your Chief of Staff, and this is a big hire. A Chief of Staff is someone senior enough to be a representative version of you in the room. They can negotiate on your behalf. They can take whole meetings off your plate and sit across from your other executives instead of you. Hiring a Chief of Staff is something I've done many times, and it's super important. You know, my current chief of staff is actually one in training. This is something you can do after you've done this a lot. You see somebody who has a lot of potential and you're like, okay, I wanna guide this person into how to become the next stage of the game. So his name's Azad, and now Azad, he can negotiate contracts for me. He's incredible at that. He can also go over to the team and he has no fear about sort of chastising people about things they should or should not be doing. And so this, your executive assistant is probably not gonna get taken as seriously. Your chief of staff Your staff is your right hand. They can be the hammer so you don't have to all the time. So you've put the free system in place. What's next? This one's tough. I want you to kill your open door policy. As the person in charge, you should have to walk the factory floor often, and that's like metaphorically speaking, walk around your office, check on what everybody's doing. But you cannot let the factory workers walk in your office to report every single red light. Walking the factory floor often is you choosing when to get information. Letting the factory floor come to you is information attacking you all day, every day, forever, and having no prioritization. Please, dear God, don't do that terrible PC nonsense business advice. Walk the floor instead. Dov Charney built American Apparel into like a $600 million company from the factory floor up. But every ad, every hire, every product decision ran through him. He was so obsessed with control, the company reportedly told retail staff how to shape their eyebrows. He never built systems that could run without him. So when the board pushed him out, the company that was Dov Charney spiraled into bankruptcy and took thousands of jobs down with it. If your business can't function without you in every decision, you don't own a business, you own a job, a very stressful job that happens to have your name on the door. Please, dear God, don't do that. And actually, I have something coming for you guys. You're going to want to be a part of this, but shh, it's not quite public yet. So how do you stay informed without being interrupted? Two things. First, for incoming asks, kill "come talk to me" and replace it with "send me a brief and then let's discuss." Oh my God, this one's so big. I wish everybody would do this. Before anyone books time on your calendar, all they do is send a short written brief. This is a standard I am constantly enforcing at my company, Contrarian Thinking. Here's the idea. Here's exactly what I need from you. 10 seconds to read, reply in writing, and only take the meeting if it genuinely needs a conversation. Sure, a real brainstorm can be briefed, but be honest, how many of your meetings are actually brainstorms? Most are someone who hasn't finished thinking, hoping to think out loud at you. A vague "Got a second?" protects the asker and taxes you. A brief forces them to do the thinking before they spend your time. And half the time they solve it themselves before they ever hit send. The brief literally works for anything, a pitch, a problem, a purchase request. The conversation only happens after the thinking is on the page. This is so important. Jeff Bezos basically credits the entirety of Amazon with how they run their meetings, which is with a 6-page briefer that they read before important decisions. Now, not every business can handle 6 pages, And not every decision needs it, but why wouldn't you make them think clearly, especially when they can talk to their AI, tell the AI to clean it up, give you some specifics, ask for action items, and get it back to you? Second, for information, you know, build a way to go get the truth instead of having it carried to you. I call this push instead of pull information. So Brad Jacobs is one of my favorite billionaires and he's built 7 or $8 billion companies by now. And he's obsessive about what he calls frontline data because he knows executives filter their reality on the way up. I kind of think about it like, you know how you walk outside and if you have a pair of sunglasses on, you think the world looks one way and you just take the sunglasses off and you're like, oh, it's actually not dark and cloudy. It was just like these things and there was like film on it and everything was a little fuzzy. Well, when he takes over a company, he asks the frontline too blunt questions. Frontline, meaning the people that are closest to the customers. What's the single best idea to improve this place? And what is the dumbest thing we do? Steal those two questions. I have access to every Slack channel across my companies. It's a mandate. Two of our teams just started running Open Claw style AI teammates, and I require them to use it only in public threads. And this isn't to be Big Brother, but I want to watch how it performs and how the team uses it. And so that's the lesson here. Go get the signal. Don't let the signal come at you. Elon Musk talks about this, that running a business is like finding the truth in a series of compounded lies. And so in business, half of your job is to find the truth inside your business, not even from your competitors outside. And so killing the open door does not mean going dark. It means you schedule the rounds instead of letting the rounds happen to you. Block the time to walk the floor, ask the blunt questions, then close the door again and do the work only you can do. I think controlling how you work and how information reaches you allows you to seal the leaks on your time. But there's one hole left, and it's the one you cut yourself—your calendar. So negotiating your calendar. I have 3 tricks to keep your calendar under control. I call it block it, batch it, assign it. Let's start with the block it. Block the hours that are off limits. Explain why to everyone you work with. Then open up your schedule for your team's needs. If your week is a wall of meetings that your team keeps adding to, that's not their fault. It's yours. It's not your team's job to guess where your boundaries are. It's your job to set them. Then once you set your blocks, it's time to batch it. Stop reacting in real time. Instead of approving things the second they ping you, Set decision windows. One day covers most of it. Review in one block, put the windows on your calendar, and your team knows exactly when they'll hear back instead of chasing you at random. Reacting all day feels responsive, but it's actually letting everyone else set the rhythm of your day. All you're doing is responding to their rhythms. You don't want to do that. Block 3, assign it. Give every task exactly one owner. By name. When a task belongs to whomever, or more likely everybody or the team, it belongs to nobody, which means it belongs to you. So every time you do someone else's job for them, I want you to remember this: you train them to keep handing it to you. So people only grow when they can carry the weight of their own work. If a project would have flopped without me swooping in, then swooping in robs the owner of the exact lesson. That would've made them great. So let them carry it. Sometimes they rise to the occasion. Sometimes they drop it, but the drop actually teaches them more than my rescue ever could. We do this aggressively in our events. So we run events at Contrarian Thinking, both for business buyers and business builders. And my team used to say, "Hey, the event's great. Everybody's having a great time. We're loving it." And I said, That doesn't mean anything to me. We have a goal. Everything we do has a KPI on it. You know what our events need to do? One, they need to drive revenue to our members. Our business owners need to make more money when they come. How much money do people make by coming to the event? Two, we need to get them to renew and stay in our ecosystem. How much revenue did it drive to us, them coming to the event? And then three, how happy were they at the event? Which I judge as testimonials on our Trustpilot. I want a number on all 3 of those every event. When I tell you your people will fight you on this, believe me, they will fight you. Now I have a spreadsheet in particular for this. I have a whole breakdown. Actually, comment events if you want us to break down how we do this live. We could do an episode on it because the truth is, if you do not execute on a specific number, your people will not know what to delegate. I think people grow when they feel the weight of their own work, so getting your time back might require getting a little tougher. You can be genuinely kind to people and still refuse to give up an hour you'll never get back. At some point, you simply decide you're done wasting time. Like, work, family, the short list of things that actually matter to you, and a clean no to, like, almost everything else. So if this one landed, Go watch our breakdown on how to actually hire and train people who do the work as well as you would. That's the other half of buying back your time, and it's where most owners fall apart. By the way, if any of this is something you want to learn more about, you're going to want to apply to our Growth Boardroom. This is where we teach business owners how to scale to 7, 8, or 9 figures. We'll teach you all of this live. You can hit the link below or go to contrarianthinking.co/boardroom.