381 7 Ways to MAKE Time (cuz you won’t find it)

Okay, we all struggle with a version of this issue. Do you struggle with when am I ever gonna find the time, find the time to do that? I just haven't found the time to do that thing yet. I don't want to be the type of person that perpetually says that that's one of those things where it's like, no, you just haven't made it a priority yet. I want to be the person that makes time for the important thing. I actually get this question a lot. How do you find time to do all these different things? X, Y, Z. I think the secret is probably all the things I don't do, the things that I delegate that other folks aren't delegating. So how do we transition from being a victim of all the things that we have to do and not being able to find the time to instead be the person that is most tactfully making time for the right things? That's what we're talking about today. We're gonna laugh, we're gonna cry, but we are gonna come out on the other end feeling inspired, taking control of our calendars more than ever before. Let's do it. Come on. In. Agency, it's something that we talk about a lot. How much you feel like you have control over your life, over your business, over the ways that you're spending your time. Oftentimes we go out to do our own thing with the goal of not having a boss and all that. And what you actually end up with is many times financial freedom. Like more money than you ever would have thought you had, but you're actually just as trapped as you've ever been. You created this thing. You're very proud of it. It's very impressive. Maybe you employ people, you've created an awesome place to work for them, but are you any more free than you were before? We talked about this a couple of weeks ago. The notion that, like, beyond a certain financial bar, and it's a little bit different for everybody, but beyond that, that threshold of where more money probably isn't going to make you much, much happier, that I think freedom after that looks like, actually freedom of time, freedom of attention span and what stands between us, and that is control of our time. A low agency version of this is what we talked about at the top. Not finding the time, as if it's just going to. As if you're just going to happen into it at one point. Right? As if you're going to one day have this wide open afternoon and you can say, ah, not now. I can finally, do this thing, let you in on a secret as an entrepreneur. That afternoon will probably never come. And the only scenario where it does come is where you take the steps that are required to scooch everything else out of the way, make some uncomfortable decisions about some things that you won't do, hold your team accountable for the responsibilities you've put them in charge of, and, like, force everything out. It's like. It's like putting air in a balloon, the balloon expanding and pushing everything else out of the way. And that is worth doing when the thing you want to do is higher value than that other stuff. And oftentimes we think about the notion of adding one more thing or taking one more call or one more meeting piling on top of the massive heap that you already have, when the better framework for how to think about that is, like, what are all of those items? And how do I pull out the lowest value 1 and slot in a higher value 1? Because if you can't do one more thing, that's not pausing to consider is this thing of a higher value to me than all the things I'm already doing? That's the question we really need to ask. I got seven specific points on this that I want to talk about. I might have just spoiled a few of them with that kind of monologue there. Number one, I'm pretty extreme on this. Eliminate everything. I approach things with the mindset that almost everything in my life can be eliminated, delegated to somebody else. And I come into everything that I do with the expectation that it will be temporary in my life. Pretty much the only thing that I'm attached to, that I feel any sort of permanence to in my professional setting, is me sitting in front of a camera. Even though right now I can. I could actually make really convincing AI clones. I could write all this stuff, have a speech model that sounds very much like me, like, to the level where probably 50% of people on the podcast wouldn't even notice. All sorts of ways that I could game that. For me, that's a nonstarter. I got to, like, show up and, like, actually be human and be authentic. I'm not willing to disassociate. I think there's a big part of why people tune into this on a regular basis is kind of the humanity. And that's something that I'm just particularly careful with. But virtually everything else about this whole operation, whatever you call this circus, those responsibilities as I come into them, I treat them as being temporary. And I don't think most People are wired that way. I don't think most small business owners are wired that way. You can definitely see it in some firm owners who are just approach firm running in a much more entrepreneurial way. This isn't everybody like if you go back to like kind of the E myth framing of are you entrepreneurial, are you a technician, like you like doing the thing or are you the manager mindset? A lot of folks are in that technician mindset, sometimes not aware of it, where they feel this friction between they want the upsides of the entrepreneurial mindset, but they are behaving day to day as technicians. There's people who love being the technicians but put themselves in a situation where a bunch of entrepreneurial things are required of them. And you have other people who start out loving the technician stuff. This was probably me and eventually evolve into enjoying the entrepreneurial stuff more. When I started out in accounting it was because I actually really enjoyed accounting. Eventually I tired of it and I was going to leave the profession before I started learning like you know, seeing kind of the first thought leadership around how to run accounting firms that I had ever seen and eventually bought the practice with a partner and found that I really loved like the entrepreneurial being out of the client work, the operations of the business, attracting talent, positioning the firm, attracting clients. That entrepreneurial side of it I actually really, really enjoyed. But that was an evolution from where I started to something different. This is an easy mindset for those entrepreneurial folks to have the notion that you should eliminate everything. But I would even, even if you are the technician, the manager mindset, I would push yourself to try to eliminate more. And there's a voice inside of us that says, well if you don't do this, what will you even do? What will your value be? What will the rest of the team say if you don't do this? And that's I, I mean for context, I had an 80 year old tax firm and I got myself completely out of client work and I was the first person in the history of that firm to ever do it. And you better believe everybody involved in that process was like, excuse me, you're not going to do work. So then what is it that you do here? Are you like some sort of passive investor? And there will be a part of you that says like oh no, I got to, I got to be down in the trenches with my gang, otherwise I'm going to lose touch if I don't do that stuff anymore. I don't know what I would even do. Let you in On a secret, there's going to be plenty to do. I think the mindset to have here is eliminate everything with the plan that you will not succeed. But if you instead come in saying I'm going to eliminate everything like up to my capacity, you will perpetually underestimate what that capacity is. So one framing of this and whenever I would talk with my team about my ambitions for their growth and stuff like that, so we get very granular and actually talk about what their day to day tasks are. If we want them to be here in 12 months time, then the tasks that they are doing in 12 months time have to be representative of where we want them to be. Somebody like me, the tasks that I do day to day evolve very, very quickly. I am never hanging on to doing the same thing more than two or three times. And so that evolution for me is very, very fast. If you want a very practical way to approach this, think how do I eliminate or delegate, you know, 25% of my tasks every quarter and then on a 12 month cycle, by and large, 12 months from now, you'll always be doing something different than you're doing now. And the inputs there, the new tasks that you're doing are more valuable than the tasks that you're moving on from. And that may not mean more valuable to the business that you have today. That could actually mean a whole bunch of different things. Could be more valuable to your family, could be more valuable to a more fulfilling version of kind of your professional path. Maybe it's something even different than what you're doing right now. But having that mindset and willingness to eliminate increases the rate at which those things turn over. This episode is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. I am a unapologetic lover of notion. In fact, my whole like personal and business life runs on notion now. And the reason I like it is it's just like a very open ended tool for like doing data and database stuff, but also narrative things like writing. If you're a notion nerd, you get it, okay? Liveflow's new financial dashboards are the closest thing I have seen to finance notion in terms of. I can build like open ended narrative docs that I send to my clients with all the words and explainers that I want to include, but embedded with very real financial Data from their QuickBooks or their Xero file. And I can publish these reports either as snapshots that are static and never change, or even publish like continuously updating reports that are pulling in live data from the ledger. So as long as the accounting file is up to date, it continues syncing that stuff in. If that's a, you know, a dashboard that the client looks at on their phone every morning or report they check in on every week. Super flexible reporting platform. Not like this, sort of pretty templatized. Here are the 12 different types of reports you can provide present. It's totally open ended. You can connect it back to anything in the accounting ledger. But because it's live flow, they also give you a bunch of templates if you don't want to have to build it from scratch. Gives you a much easier way to get started. And that's why I like Live Flow. Learn more Check out the link down the Show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Makers Hub Renewal Season Cross Sell Alert Bill Pay One of the things that is being changed the fastest by AI. Regular old bill pay, but also like crazy technical bill pay. You got people that are doing like receiving inventory management. This is where like there's mountains of time savings to be had by getting into bill pay. It's actually a great way to specialize your firm, like differentiate you from other providers. If you're looking for a way to get a foot in the door with folks doing, you know, manufacturing anything that requires warehousing, having a service like this that you can crush and come in and get an immediate win with someone. Especially as there's so much marketing hype around AI. If you can be the accounting firm that's like man, AI is totally transforming this type of business and our firm is going to come in and show you how really cool opportunity. Makers Hub, more than anybody else I've seen, is leaning into AI vision models and large language models to push this stuff like to a level that's never before been possible. If you're looking for a way to spice up renewal season, think about bill pay. I did it in my firm led to actually a bunch of other great cash advisory services could be worth checking out. Learn more about Maker Sub Check out the link down and in the show notes Thought number two Embrace newfound ignorance. The fear of getting out of the trenches and not doing that work anymore. This may be the biggest thing holding people back is oftentimes there's a real sense of identity tied up in the doing of the thing. In my case, I was a 15 year accountant until one day I decided I don't do accounting anymore. I don't do tax work anymore, I don't do client work anymore. And you better believe that was a hard thing for my identity to sort of grapple with what I then did was much more ambiguous. What I do now is incredibly ambiguous. We had some family in town last night, and it's like, good luck explaining all of this to them. But with that willingness to become ignorant of the things that you are sort of based in today comes the opportunity to be plugged into something more valuable. I may. I may have shared this story on the podcast before. I can't remember. We were at a dinner party with some local friends and the talking with a guy that is basically a COO at a legal practice in New York City, and they've got about 150 attorneys. And he recently stopped practicing to become the COO. And he was asking me about what I do, and he was like, were you worried when you. When you sold your firm that you would ultimately be out of touch with how to run an accounting firm, so you weren't really in a position to advise people on how to do that? He had the exact same reaction that most accountants will have. Like, you don't run an accounting firm. Then you can't actually tell me how to run an accounting firm. And we had just been talking about some struggles he'd been going through in his transition to COO that were all the things that you would expect. Getting. Getting attorneys to standardize the way that they approach things, modernizing their systems when the attorneys really didn't want to have to change systems. And his struggles with the attorneys in the firm, you know, him kind of losing some of his street cred with them because he wasn't actually practicing anymore. And I asked him, I said, are you out of touch with. With practicing now that you're a CEO? And his immediate response was, no. Like, I was just doing it. Like, I know all the things that they're doing. He said, but I've. I have a different focus and a different level of perspective now to where I see the value of a different set of. Of problems that I can solve for the firm if I can just get everybody on board with that. And I asked him, I said, do you think there's any other firms in the city that are having the same problem right now? And he's like, I imagine just about every single other firm has this same problem. I said, have you ever talked with any of them? Do you know any of them? Have you heard what's working and what's not working for those other firms? He's like, no, we don't talk about stuff like that. And I'm like, well, that's what I did, I sold my practice and now I just talk with firms and I reflect all that stuff out for other firms to learn. And so in the end did I become ignorant to running an accounting firm in many ways probably. Like the day to day of being in the weeds of all that stuff. Probably. But I would argue that I traded that ignorance for something that is better and something that is more valuable for a specific type of person. That is my ability to absorb what I'm hearing from real firm owners, what's working and what's not working. You know, boiling that down to tech recommendations and having them on the podcast to talk about stuff like, you know, how they're doing production based pay, which we've got coming up. And I'm really excited for that. And none of that would be possible if I still ran my accounting firm. So when you run a firm, you can provide a very, very high resolution, look into your own tunnel vision. And that's useful. But the more useful version of that to me happens more at a macro level where we can share more of that stuff across more firms. And that's what I in my mind traded up into is I accepted being ignorant of running my own firm in order to do something more valuable. And there's a million versions of that that you will go through in your professional life from, you know, my firm changing tax software and me not learning the new tax software so I could no longer prepare a tax return, which was my identity. But by not becoming an expert on that new software platform, it made it easier to push back on the team, to be like, I have 40 people working for me. Do I need to be the one to call the tax software company? Do I need to be the expert on this or that or the other thing? I certainly don't. But if I was not willing to become ignorant of that thing, I wouldn't have the bandwidth to get into the more valuable thing. And that's kind of what this is all about. All right, number three, I've been, I've been re listening to the book who not how man, it is so good. I can tell you personally one thing that has perpetually been a blocker for me is we think that we are like the best. We're not all like this. But until you've hired somebody that's better than you at a specific thing, you kind of just assume like, well, I'm the best that we've got. Or when the reality is for any given thing, any given responsibility, there's somebody that's better than you. It's really hard not to have this mindset of I'm the best thing that could possibly be for my client. Like, let's just acknowledge, almost all of us feel this, the notion that we are the best thing possible for our clients. But that's obviously not the case. We can't all be the best. Right? And it's maybe a little easier to think about this at the firm level because a firm is a collection of people and processes and all that stuff. But it's harder to do at a personal level. Like we, most of us have this sort of pride and conviction in our capabilities and what we do, and that's really valuable for us as entrepreneurs. But it is, it can be uncomfortable to acknowledge that there's not a single thing that you do that somebody else can't do better than you. And it is in leaning into this that your focus turns more towards who would be an even better person to do this job and take us to the next level than just sticking with the status quo and having me or the team member that does it now continue to do this task. In fact, an interesting framing for this, this is not an ad, but the tool RC reports that does reasonable compensation studies for S Corps and kind of other contexts. One of the drivers that they use for setting that quote, reasonable compensation figure is it asks the business owner to split out what are all the responsibilities that, that they do. And, and so in a past video that we did, the person was like, they owned a bookshop or something like that, and they split out all of their responsibilities. And one was like book binding, another was like book restoration or something like that. But then there was stuff like office manager and you split up all those responsibilities by percentage. But then you also put like how good they are at those things. And this hypothetical person, understandably, is not a good office manager. And so the collection of your team, your. You have all these different things that are asked of you and the people in your team and they're just not going to be good at all these things. It's, it's easy to look at somebody and generalize them up to their like, peak capability in their domain. And so you may think you're going to be a really good accounting firm owner because you're a really good tax accountant or something like that. And we just, we just know that this isn't the case, right, because there's so many other responsibilities that come along with this. And at its worst, you can really be hard on yourself and, and it can feel like you're failing your team and your clients when you're not capable of doing every single one of these things. Because it's oftentimes that pressure you put on yourself to be the hero for all types of things that gets you like way over capacity. And then you're just under serving your clients and under serving your staff because you just don't have time to do it all. It is the difference between like you sitting there and making shoes all day versus you going out and looking for the machine that'll make shoes. And all the trade offs there are the same where you're like, well that machine's not going to make shoes just like I will. And that's going to take time to go out and find the right one. That's going to take forever. But it's like, it's like what's the alternative? Oftentimes money's a thing here too where maybe you got to pay somebody more than you've ever had to pay somebody before. And the truth is if that person is the right person, it unlocks something that your business has never achieved before. So it is something more akin to an investment. That and yet another salary on the books, another person to do month end closes or another person to prepare tax returns that is an extension of your current processes that's doing more of the same. But a person who is better at something, that's an investment and that ought to raise the bar for the company as a whole. That ought to actually impact the bottom line by unlocking new types of work, letting you get your brain cells being applied in a different direction where you freeing up that time like you can drive some other aspect of the business. That right person, if they truly are better at that thing, they are an investment, not just another line item. Okay, number four, start your day with long term investments. The things that otherwise normally fall off at the end of the day. Very practical example of this. I love working out. I'm sure you noticed and you know, certainly nobody said anything, but I appreciate you not embarrassing me by asking. And historically I always work out in the morning. Cause that's how I make sure it happens. At one point I was like, man, I'm so productive first thing in the morning. I need to move my working out later because I can get so much stuff done. And so I'm like, I kind of hit a wall on work at like 3pm every afternoon or so. I'm like, I'll just go work out then. And you know what happened? I didn't do a whole lot of Working out because the day expanded and stuff got pushed off of the back end of the day, including exercising. And that's just how every single day works. And until you start like front loading the day with the stuff that's not ephemeral, the stuff that's actually an investment in yourself or your business, something that works while you sleep, until you prioritize that stuff, it kind of just doesn't happen. Think about the tasks that you did on the last business day. It is shocking. And this is, I mean this is a struggle for all service businesses, but it is shocking the percentage of those tasks that you will never think about again. Again. The things that you did the last business day, like 98% of those things you will never think about again. It is churning the service business butter. And the amazing opportunity that you have is to be the person in your business that rises above that, that extracts themselves from that butter churning. But in my experience, unless you start the day with those intentional things where you're like, okay, I just decided this is higher value, this will take me on a different trajectory. If I just, if I just stay on this bicycle and I just keep pedaling, I can see where we're going. But I can also see that if I, if I change X, Y and Z, we're going to go to a better place. Well, you got to get off the bicycle in order to make those changes. And that only happens when you prioritize it. And in my experience, try to start my day with those long term investments rather than hoping that I get to them at the end of the day. This episode is sponsored in part by Ramp Gang. New Year's resolutions. They are just around the corner. They're gonna creepin up, creeping up any old day. Now my resolution for you is for your clients to stop using stanky old financial products. Kay. So many bookkeeping workflow issues and even fraud issues could be easily presented today. Presented, prevented. That's what they could be today. Easily prevented by a better banking and card stack. He just. What did he just say? Yeah, banking and card stack. It's tech buddy, your client that just bumbled on into the Wells Fargo across the street. The Chase, whatever it is, is a better option. Ramp, it's a spend management platform. It's going to save you a whole pile of headaches when it comes to bookkeeping workflows. And when it comes to your clients being able to allocate spend to members of the team. I'm not talking about the office card that they can go out and get donuts with and buy staplers. No like responsible spend manage and you the accountants. Like we're actually in a pretty good spot where we could be advisors here and help them modernize their money tech stack. Okay. I'm a happy user myself. We actually use Ramp internally. It's a good tool, good platform. Learn more the link down in the Show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by True Prep. True Prep's like a cool, almost like a chatgpt like experience for tax firms that lets you query your actual client tax data to be like I don't know, we're do some tax planning. Show me, show me every 1040 that had over 5000 in tax penalties last year. Like you can literally do that returns the whole list. It'll even let you drill into the detail. Does some other cool stuff now too like basic tax research. Like they've built IRS publications some background information into the platform. Client asked a quick question you wanted to drop draft a little memo like draft response to the client. It's a great starting point. Also they've even got like a very basic kind of built in year over year projection tool now. So let's say your W2 is going to double but your withholdings won't. Like what will that look like year over year? True Prep's even getting into stuff like that. It's the closest thing to like an open ended chat resource for your tax firm. Very cool. Worth checking out. Learn more about True Prep at the link down the show notes. Tip number five Be unreachable. Is this something that you afford yourself? The ability to not answer the phone? The ability to not leave email up. The ability to not have an open door policy. The open door policy I would argue is like the worst thing virtue signaling has brought to 21st century work because the best version of you is the one that has time and capacity to give that back to your team. And this whole notion that like it's an awesome workplace and you're always available and this and that you're not at your best for anybody if you're always available. The traditional office environment frankly is a mess in this regard. And I was man so many things from just old legacy firm. I was one of the only people in my firm, we had a, we had a big office building. I was one of the only people in my firm that would have my door closed quite a bit. And in that context, in that sort of culture, it was like wow, a hole. Like you're not as open and accessible as everybody else. And I'm like No, I'd actually argue that I'm. I'm more intentionally accessible than anybody else because I'm creating space for myself to get the stuff done that I need to get done without, like, I mean, gosh, the normal office environment where there's people bumping up and down the halls and your doorways open, and it's just constant distraction and folks popping their head in every 15, 20 minutes, especially if you're the boss. It is a mess. It is an absolute mess when all of these, like, complex client scenarios and this and that always come to you. I mean, the distributed work version of this is teams and slack and stuff like that. But there's so much power in being unreachable. There was a point in firm running for me when I got out of client work initially. Then, like, what my entire day became was firefighting. And part of it too, was me being like, how do I provide value to this firm? And everybody's kind of struggling with, like, what do you mean you don't do client work? So I was kind of always running around being everything for everybody. And very quickly my responsibilities just became like a different type of hamster wheel where I was getting sucked into absolutely everything and people were coming to me with all these different things because I was willing to be the hero last time they had this problem. But ultimately from there, then I was able to look at all those things I was getting sucked into and being like, who needs to be the subject matter expert for this thing? Okay, now this is this person's job. And one by one, you kind of go down the list and say, well, if something's still coming to me, that's my fault because I haven't made clear whose job it is to be the expert at that thing, or I haven't properly deflected to them and enabled them and supported them and say, I understand that you're coming to me about this, but that's. That's that person's job. Or the account manager on this client is this other person that needs to be their decision to be made. And you don't let them do the old end around when they don't like the answer. And that sort of thing. Like, my job ultimately is to put the people in those seats who will make those decisions, whether I agree with a hundred percent of them or not. But if anything, and everything is coming to you all day long, and you don't even have the option of being unreachable, it's really hard to actually get your nose down, do the stuff that you need to do. Number six, do an email fast. Actually just shot a video about email that'll be going out on YouTube soon. One of the things I said was like, you got to get to a point where you can only check email once a day. And I'll just, I'll just get murdered for that in the comments because that's so out of touch and feels so impossible to so many people, the notion that you could only check email once a day. And I, I got there and I actually got beyond that to where I didn't even need to check it every day. And today I don't check email every day. But people will say, well, you don't run an accounting firm. Well, it's the same way when I ran an, ran an accounting firm, I would argue that, like, email is actually the leading reason why people won't take a break and won't go away and won't take vacations is the risk of something coming in that you're going to miss. Which is just wild to me. And you'll see this in your staff when they say, I'm going to go on this trip or this or that. But I will check email. No, stop it. If I'm the boss, like when I'm running my firm, I have 40 people under my employee. And you mean to tell me that if I'm going to leave for a day or leave for a week, that I'm the only person that could handle the things that come into that inbox? I mean, if you are to a degree like that's, that's your fault for, for not hiring and, and for positioning yourself to have to be the expert for too many things. And this is, I mean, this is maybe the hardest aspect of solo firm running that I would really struggle with. But even here, if that's you, like, there's ways to navigate this around being clear about client communications of you being away and stuff like that. But if you run a team, for goodness sakes, if you want to be the hero for everything, that's the trade off is that the hero always has to be there. You always have to be around. And some of the best changes come from forced, like acceleration of a change. Like early on, when I was running my managed accounting practice and I was doing everything myself from scratch with our first few clients to kind of figure out the systems and all that. And I was doing bill pay for some of our bigger clients. And I was going on a trip from a graduate program for two weeks to Southeast Asia and I had a Guy in my firm who was like very early on in supporting me in the managed accounting practice. And it was only because it was the summer and there wasn't any tax work for him to do and I had to very quickly get him up to speed on paying bills for these big clients and like having the confidence to do that and being able to ensure that there's actually cash available to pay these things. And it was a lot and it happened very, very fast. But had I not had that trip, that same thing probably would have taken like three to six months to make that same transition. Had another huge example of this from a member of our team who went on maternity leave where ripping that band aid off because they had to leave and a bunch of other folks had to step into some of these responsibilities, it accelerated what would have been a much longer and drawn out transition. So if you want a way to get out from under your email, obviously there's a lot of strategies and how you pull people into the inbox and the right ways and wrong ways to do that. But if you want to do that and for it to actually work, take a two week email fast. You can still go to work, you still go into the office, whatever that looks like for you. But if you really want to test that out, don't open the inbox, rip that band aid off. Honestly, it may be the best thing that you ever do because if you think about all the responsibilities across running your firm and how much anxiety is associated with each of those responsibilities, for most people, email is one of the highest contributors of anxiety to your workday. Number seven, last one here. Rethink your meeting strategy. I think we've all, since COVID had a degree of zoom fatigue and none of us are excited to take yet one more meeting. But to bring this full circle to what we talked about at the top is if you've got this just this giant heap of responsibilities and that one next thing feels like just one more that you're going to pile on top of it and you don't have time to do that. The problem is, do you have a clear framework to understand everything that's in the pile today? And can you confidently say that this is not any more valuable than all the other things in that pile? Remember, like CD racks, man. There was a guy I knew, a buddy's dad growing up, where you go into their living room and he's a real music nut and he just had these huge, massive CD racks. The jewel cases are just like, you know, 100, 100 per stack. And these big old tall things bigger than me. And it was like he had, you know, 15 or 20 of these things. Think of that like, stack of CD cases. Like that is all of your responsibilities. And the more organized that is, the better. So that when somebody hands you another CD like a jewel case and there's no slots in there, you can skim down through that and be like, okay, this is an invitation to say, join a mastermind group with some really smart firm owners that I, that I look up to. And I don't have time for this right now, but surely if I skim down this stack, there's something in here that ought to be removed and it might be uncomfortable and, and it might mean putting some pressure on someone to take this responsibility off my plate. It might mean having a hard conversation with a client because this is actually something that we have no business doing to begin with. But the decision of whether to add that thing is a product of what is the least valuable meeting that's on there. Right? And too often I actually see people miss out on really, really valuable opportunities because they're too loaded up with low value opportunities. Right? Or you don't even have the brain space at all. As a result, do even think and assess and organize that list of responsibilities. Like if you're in a spot where you're like, I'll be honest, I don't even know what my jobs are right now. I kind of just get out of bed, rock up to the computer, and I, I let Jesus take the wheel. That is a sign of not even just having the space to assess and, and be mindful of what you're doing. And so that's probably like, the CD rack is full and there's a pile of CDs on the floor too. I think we all aspire to be high agency people. We love the idea of being in control of our journey, especially, you know, entrepreneurs. And you are much more so than, like, if you go into holiday get togethers right now, and if you're like me, you're sitting in a room full of a bunch of people that all work for somebody else. And we don't realize just how much we have a wildly different worldview than they do, and a fundamentally different level of agency than someone who is under somebody else's employee. But amongst entrepreneurs, you still see a massive spectrum of agency and time. The only resource that you can't get more of it is the most important thing for you to have control over. And it's easy to convince ourselves that we are victim to everything else that's happening around us. But you don't want to, you don't want to give in to that because then you're just along for the ride and that's no fun. If you got anything that you've like eliminated this last year, drop that in the comments. Maybe that'll inspire somebody. We all come to this with very, very different thoughts on what's normal and even comprehensible. Like, you hear about what other people do and you're like, well, that would never work. You know, like firms that don't have a phone, like there's just so many examples or doing that two week email fast. So many things like that where the first time you hear it you're like, that's literally incomprehensible to me. And then you hear from like, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, okay, there's actually some other people that have done this. Maybe I just, maybe I just need to break my assumptions about how all this stuff works and how I can get this specific thing done. And until I break that, I can't get over that, that hump and kind of reach past that plateau to something that's better. So if you have something like that that you've given up, drop that in the comments. You might inspire somebody and that's it. Thanks for coming and hanging.