019: Most Valuable Activities with Dave Crenshaw

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability. Like the stylish and efficient Camry. The Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello everybody. I am delighted to be here today with my friend Dave Crenshaw. Dave develops productive leaders in Fortune 500 companies, universities and organizations of every size. His courses on LinkedIn learning have been viewed tens of millions of times. He's notorious in our community of fellow authors and speakers as being the LinkedIn learning expert. He's just, it's incredible what he's built over there. And his five books have been published in eight languages, the most popular of which is the topic of today's conversation. Newly released, released in second edition, it's called the Myth of Multitasking. How Doing It All Gets Nothing Done. Dave, welcome to the show.

Hey Jenny, I'm so glad to be here.

I am so glad to be here too. I want to kick us off with a proverb that you cite in the book that I heard once before as it relates to business and streams of income. You cite this proverb, if you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one. And I think business owners have a particular propensity for chasing a lot of rabbits when it comes to how they design their business. Both out of dreams and visions and hope, but also out of a panicky feeling like, well, what if this one doesn't work? I better go chase five rabbits at time. The same. Same time. Can you just, I know you started coaching entrepreneurs. How does this proverb come into play with what you see among your clients?

It really is someone, it's, it's that desire to chase every opportunity and it is that feeling. There's a little bit of fear of missing out. But it is also this sort of thing. Like, I have an idea, therefore the idea must be good and it must be pursued so what happens is you get entrepreneurs who are splitting their attention in five, six, seven, eight ways. And what they don't realize is they look at someone, let's say, like a Mark Cuban, right? And they go, that's, that's my guy. I want to be like that. And they see a guy like Mark Cuban or a woman like Barbara Cochran, and they've got all sorts of different businesses happening at once. And they say, oh, well, I need to emulate that. What they don't realize is that every successful entrepreneur, the most successful ones, actually had a business that focused on one thing for an extended period of time. Time. And they got that one thing to the point of mastery. The most notable example would be Amazon. Now, if you're, if you're young, if you're, you know, let's say in your 20s, you might not realize this, but Amazon used to only be a bookstore, and it was like that for seven years or more. And yet we see entrepreneurs who are in such a rush to diversify that what they do is they limit their growth. And this was something that, that I saw both on the macro level in terms of what the business was pursuing, but also on the micro level of the business owner themselves. Because if I sat down and I looked at all the different job responsibilities, the average listener that you have has it's 10 to 20 different job descriptions. And when you set your day up like that, in a structural sense, you are already limiting your success because every time you jump your attention from something, from one thing to something else, you are going to pay a cost. You're going to pay switching cost.

That makes a lot of sense for so many business owners, even when they feel like they want to focus and myself included. So I'll even speak for myself. I've come through phases where I intend to focus on one thing in a given day. But as the team gets more complex, there can be this like, peppering of questions constantly or pings. And, you know, I used to feel like I am happy to jump and answer a team member's question because it means that more work then gets done. I'm not standing in their way. I'm now I've learned to help redirect questions as well back to them. You know, I set that up differently. But it's so hard to navigate those interruptions where if I quickly go answer, I know that more a cascade of work will get done. But you even have in the book at the back, a tracking team interruptions exercise where you have people track all the different reasons that Team members are reaching out to them. And I wonder if you could address this challenge as a business owner, because as you said, regardless of how many revenue streams, which is probably too many, even within the day to day management of the team, it can be hard to stay focused on what the owner is working on compared to, you know, attending to everyone else's needs.

Well, okay, so when the book first came out, I cited a study by an organization called Basics Research. And they surveyed thousands of knowledge workers around the globe. And they found that the average knowledge worker loses 28% of their day due to two things, interruptions and the recovery time associated with those interruptions. Now, the book came out in 2008, the first edition since then. And in my work with organizations, I think that number is extremely low. In fact, there was a group called Realization Technologies. They, they looked at when companies reduced multitasking, productivity increased 90, excuse me, productivity increased 59.8%. So I think that the average person listening to this is probably in between that. I think they're probably losing about 40% of their day due to interruption switches and intention getting pulled from one thing to another. One of those culprits, as you, as you mentioned that I cover in the book, is that team members are asking each other questions. And these interruptions have only proliferated since 2008 because we have all these chat apps, right? All these different tools that we can use like Slack and Asana and Microsoft Teams. And we can send a text message to someone at any moment. That text message pops up and now we have to give it our attention. Every little interruption, every little attention switch like that has a cost associated with it. And the cost is greater than just the time that you spend looking at it, right? Let's say that I am typing an email, Jenny. I'm writing, you know, deep, thoughtful email, and then all of a sudden a notification pops up on my screen. I'm midway through the email, so what do I have to do? I turn, I look at that notification that I got. You asked me this deep question. I say the answer is 42. I hit send. Now what do I need to do? I've got to return my attention back to that email. I got to reread what I was writing, all that different stuff, and then I can start writing again. So that that quick question cost me maybe five minutes of value of time. And if you allow your day to get chewed to pieces by all these little things, you are just destroying your productivity. So instead you want to have a set time as much as Possible of when you're going to ask and answer all these quick questions. So a quick meeting is more effective than a handful of quick questions.

I like how you also, you say in the switch tasking exercise readers have to write multitasking is worse than a lie. And you actually say that it can be 15 to 100% increase in time spent on the task that you're originally working on if you're getting interrupted like that.

Yeah. I worked with one entrepreneur in the beginning when I first started doing my time management consulting and she gave me the story about how she was having a conversation with the distributor while her employee was interrupting her. And so she was like going back and forth and answering both questions and then looking at her email. And she said that she spent an hour doing all of these things at the same time. And then she realized what she was doing because I had been coaching her and she stopped and she said, wait, I'm going to focus on this. When she focused on it, she got it done in five minutes. What she was trying to accomplish in one hour, she got completed in five minutes simply because she chose to focus on one thing at a time rather than switch tasking.

So when you say to set aside specific time for interruptions, even if it's from team members so well intentioned that stop people trying to grab our attention. For social media stuff like that, do you recommend that each person has basically office hours set up? How do you set this up with your team, both for you as the owner and your time, and then even them pinging each other. When do they get to ping each other and ask an answer? And I'm just curious how you set this up.

Yeah, so there are a couple of different layers here that make it work. The first is having just a quick one to one meeting. And that actually for my company, the way that we've structured it to this point, we do it once every two weeks and that's enough for most businesses that's probably not going to be enough. I've seen people effectively set these up for maybe 15 minutes at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day where you just kind of circle, you have a huddle, you talk to each other, you say, okay, this is what happened today. That's the first layer. The second layer is saying we need to have an expectation that we establish with each other of when we're going to use each of these different methods of communication. For example, if we're going to use a chat method, when is the appropriate amount of time that we can go without responding. That's opposite of what most people think. They go, well, I need to respond to this quickly. No, all I want to say is how long can you wait? How long is it okay to not respond? And even if it's once every hour, great, Then set an appointment with yourself at the end of every hour for just five minutes to glance at it. To look at it. If you do that, you're going to be far more efficient than what most people do, which is constantly checking things over and over. There was a study by Rescue Time, which is a great app to help with your focus, by the way, and they found that the average number of minutes that someone can go between checking email or instant messages is 6. That means that 10 times every hour most people are interrupting themselves or being interrupted by messages. So if we can get that from six, from 10 times per hour down to once per hour, that's a considerable improvement in everyone's productivity.

I love Rescue Time and that statistic was so shocking as well. It's kind of one of those that's shocking, yet not surprising. But because not only is it sometimes if you have push notifications on, but there's also this reflexive thing like almost procrastinating by just hitting refresh on various inboxes.

Yes. Procrastination by acting busy. That's a very common thing. Like we try to get ourselves involved in something else rather than doing the work that's truly valuable.

Yes. I want to highlight too for listeners, what I love about the team Interruption tracker is that you very clearly categorize all the different things that could happen. So someone's coming to you, looking to you for an as an advisor. They're asking you a question, they're pinging about calendaring, scheduling. You need to delegate something. You're coordinating, assisting them or following up that if you actually track all these different types of interactions, then you can check in as you said, with do you need more frequent one on ones? Do you need to set up office hours? Do you need to define your communication channels? And I will say like we only use Slack for time sensitive pings. But it still gets confusing. Even in my very tiny business, we have said like we don't use email to communicate. We're in notion. Slack is for time sensitive text is I need you to see this right now. And yet it still can sometimes get confusing of oh, where, who am I asking what, where, when and did I hear back, you know, so I think it's, it's kind of, it's definitely A work in progress.

Well, you bring up a good point and it's something I like to talk to my clients a lot about, which is there's no such thing as common sense. We sometimes think it's just common sense that if I get an email I need to respond to it, you know, within a few hours or you know, if I get a text message, it needs to be immediate. Well, the reason why that seems obvious to you is because of repeated life experience. As someone who's in the United States, it's common sense to me that I'm supposed to drive on the right hand side of the road. And yet if I go to the uk it's common sense to them, it's the left. So why is there two different, why are there two different sets of common sense? It's simply because that's repeated life experience. So let's go back to this principle of all these different channels of communication that we have. You cannot expect people on your team to know the best frequency to respond to something of what channel is important. You have to have that conversation and you want to put, put it into a document that says here's what we're going to do. And then on top of it, like you said Jenny, you know, we talk about it but then it sometimes get off, gets off track. You have to keep looking at it and keep talking about it because that is the only way to create common sense. It's through repetition.

I love what you're saying too because for all the systems that we have defined, what I haven't done is say here's how long you can wait both if, if you team member are the one responding in a certain channel and how long I might take. Cause sometimes if I don't respond to a, let's say in notion, our main hub within a day, maybe the team member gets worried and so they go put it in Slack. But really it's just that in my head, which I've never expressed out loud, oh I don't. That wasn't time sensitive or I don't need to respond even for a whole week there was nothing urgent. Not that I would want to just ghost my team, but I can sometimes get into that mode on accident. But so it'd be really interesting to say hey team members, like unless something is due the following day in general our default turnaround time within notion is x 2 days, 3 days, 4 days in slack same day is ideal and just giving something as simple as that and even in Slack it doesn't need to be instantaneous. Cause, like, I don't even want to feel that I have a leash to slack, where it's like, oh, my God, as soon as the pain comes in, nothing. We're. I'm not a brain surgeon. Almost everything can wait until a couple hours later, if not end of day.

Yeah. You highlight the. The importance of understanding that emergencies do happen. There are emergencies in business, and we need to have an emergency channel. You know, I'm a geek. I like Batman. So I think of it as the Bat phone. Right? That's when Commissioner Gordon says, something's going on, I got to have a direct line to him. You need to have that, whether that's text message, whatever it is. But the problem that happens in businesses is that what most people think of as emergencies are actually impatiencies. We're just. We just can't handle the uncertainty of not having a response. So part of the conditioning that I do with clients and I talk about in the book is moving from a culture of now to the culture of when. The culture of now says, if I have a response, I need it right now, and if you don't answer it now, then I'm going to ping you on text. If you don't answer it on text, I'm going to call you. It just keeps happening over and over. And so there are all types of attention switches happening. Instead, we want to switch to the culture of now and say, when is the longest that we can go? And that applies not just communication, but everything, Every kind of project that you're working on, rather than thinking that it has to get done within the next two weeks, which is how most people think. Ask yourself, how long can this wait? When is the latest, then this can get done. And then schedule time to work on it. Not right up against the edge of that date, but just a little bit back from it. So if you can wait two months, schedule it out seven weeks from now. And then that way you're leaving room in your schedule for what is a truly a great priority and needs to be done now.

I love what you said about most people think emergencies are just impatiencies. That's so funny. That's really funny. I want to tell that to all the. Do you get a bunch of cold pitches or emails where people are like, it's just attempting for the third time since I haven't heard back from you, it's like, impatiencies. That's what I'm going to tell them. I need a blog post that I can send them from Dave Crenshaw.

Hey, you Know, I'll be glad to help.

Even in the world of email, what I think is a reasonable turnaround time is like, my default is about a week, and that's if things are going well. But some people that might just be like, is everything okay? You know, it's really funny to try to communicate these with the outside world, not just our internal team.

Well, and that's just the simple thing that I do too, and my team does. If someone says, you know, not now, then we simply say, okay, well, how long would you like us, how long would you like us to wait until we follow up again? Then that way they're choosing that date and we're not constantly pinging them on what we perceive to be our best schedule. And I think, again, that's a good principle to do with your team, both directions. When you delegate something to someone, give them an expectation as to when you want it done. I can't believe how often I see in small businesses that people just don't do that one thing. Just set an expectation as to the timeline. And also, you want to teach your team to ask you that same question if you tell them to do something you want them to ask, when do I need to get this to you? Or even better, when is the latest that I can get this to you that will help them appropriately prioritize and reduce attention switches in their day.

Yes, and there's something very crucial I learned early in my days at Google. There was a book called, we all read called Conscious Business. And he says for any deadline, you can say yes, no, or renegotiate. So if somebody asks you for something by a certain deadline, you can say yes and then you commit to it. It's called impeccable commitments. You could say no or you renegotiate. So one thing that's really important to me is I almost never care if someone has to miss a deadline. It's like it's almost never truly urgent to that day. But if it goes by unacknowledged, like if the deadline comes and goes and there's not a peep and there's been no renegotiating and no updates, that's what bugs me. It's like the lack of just integrity around. So I think it's what you said is so important. It's like the person assigning needs to be clear of what's the ideal turnaround time. The person accepting needs to be clear if they can actually do that. And if you're not going to make it, just got to renegotiate an action.

Step that we sometimes miss is waiting for something that actually is an action. I'm waiting to get this for some from someone. And whenever you delegate something out to someone, you also need to create a waiting for action for yourself. Meaning if I say, hey Jenny, can you get this to me on Friday? Then I'm also going to create a reminder on my task reminders calendar that I'm waiting for it. And I usually set that reminder to be just after the date. So like if I'm asking for it on Friday, I set the reminder for Monday. That way I give you a little bit of generous room for for error. But I also don't forget and I even if you got it into me on time, I use that reminder as saying, hey, thank you for getting that to me on time. I really appreciate it. We need to follow up both on the positives as well as the negatives.

Yes. I just read One Minute Manager because it was one of these in the business book world that was such a mega hit and I never read it. And he talks about One Minute praisings. What does he say? Like get in the habit of catching people doing something right. So there it is. We'll be right back just after this.

With Venmo Stash a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stache on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more. Pick a bundle with your go tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Stash terms.

Dave okay, I want to shift gears because I have to ask you about this for the benefit of everyone listening as well. You have a very interesting process for hiring freelancers from networks like Upwork. And when you first shared this with me, I thought that is so smart how he does that. So two part question, I would love for you to just share a little bit about how you operate your team. You know, like I think we share a philosophy of trying to stay relatively small and agile and then what that means in terms of how you do find quality people who maybe aren't working full time but you are going to services like Upwork and how you really vet them and it's just so fascinating. So I'd love for you to enlighten us.

Sure. So before I talk about the structure, you have to understand the philosophy that I come from. And I take this, teach this in all my time management training, which is you need to focus on what is most valuable. I mentioned before about how entrepreneurs have 10 to 20 different job descriptions, but only one, maybe two of those things are your most valuable activities. I call them your MVAs. And the more and more that you can focus your time on those most valuable activities, the more valuable your business becomes. And in fact, one of the things that keeps a small business from growing is a business owner who spends too much time in their LVAs and their less valuable activities. They're running small errands. They're doing things that could have been delegated to someone else, either because they didn't want to take the time to delegate it, or sometimes they have a little bit of an ego and feel like no one can do it as well as they can. You have to let go of those things and start to delegate to other people. And with my team, when I bring them on, I tell them what my most valuable activities are. They're two things. It's creating valuable training and delivering that training. So right now, having this conversation with you, I'm in the middle of one of those MVAs, and I tell my team, if I am doing anything other than those two things, I'm not leading properly, and I need to help you get those off my plate. Throughout the years, I've had several different configurations, but always it's been lean. I mean, I've never really had more than four employees at a time. Right now I've got one who's full time in the Philippines and one who's full time in the United States. And the process that I use for hiring those, I always like to use upwork. And I like upwork not just for those things, because we have lots of other things that we delegate. Smaller tasks through contractors, that kind of stuff. For instance, you know, editing my book, right? And how I find these contractors is I put out a job description, and I'm very clear about before I talk about their skills, I talk about their traits. What kind of person would want this job? Are they an introvert? They're an extrovert? Are they someone who loves to focus on small tasks? Are they someone who likes to be more creative? So I focus on the traits first, and then I talk about the skills. So I put up the job listing, and then I'll hire, usually around three different people. And I'll say, here is One task, I'm going to pay you for your time. I'm going to pay you a fair rate for your time to perform this task for me. And then after I work with the three of you, then I am going to hire one of you full time based on my experience of the work that you did, how well we communicated with each other, just whether or not we gelled together. And I find that that process has really never led me astray because now I get to test someone out while paying them for their time before I commit to a long term relationship.

And are you. Do you say to them, I'm hiring you and two others at the same time?

Yes. Yep.

I love that.

Make it very clear what the process is. I have to make sure that the task is something that can be performed in a short amount of time, you know, perhaps an hour to two hours, Something like that. For example, like with hiring my executive assistant, one of the things that I deal with is people asking me random questions on the Internet through social media. Right. So I gave them a question and I would say, I want you to do a little research about the kinds of things that I teach, and then I want you to craft a response to this person. And then I might go two layers deeper. Then they reply with this, what are you going to reply next? And so then I'm getting an idea of first of all how serious they are about this. Are they really getting to know me or are they just kind of trying to phone it in? And then I also get an idea of their writing style and whether or not I feel like that's gonna fit for how I do that.

Yeah, I love just it's so much easier than trying to take a shot in the dark, you know, and just vet somebody from the interview process or portfolio submission. That can be so challenging. And I just love this approach to pay them and have them do some work for you. But there is so much that you can learn about, as you said, how they communicate, the timing, the cadence, the creativity, how much effort they put in. That makes a lot of sense.

And I learned too, actually when I do this, you know, I'm thinking about it. When I do that, I'm also learning about what I really want. Because no one, especially if you're not a Fortune 500 company, you don't have years of experience of the kind of person who fits into this cog. You're trying to fill a position that covers several different job responsibilities. So sometimes when I go through this process, I'm like, oh, I didn't realize that was important. So this kind of a thing allows me to learn and make mistakes as well.

I also love that you are so crystal clear on your MVAs, your most valuable activities, delivering quality, valuable training and creating valuable training.

Yes.

What percentage in a given week, realistically speaking, would you say you end up working on these MVAs and what percentage falls outside of that?

Well, it's been an evolutionary process. I mean my, my career started. I'm 46 now. I actually started when I was 23. Now there's some, some breaks along the way but, but I'm probably to the point now where I would say about 80 to 90% of my time is in my MBAs. And also my work week is greatly compressed. I don't work, you know, I'm basically working under a part time job at this point. But if you asked me, say, I don't know, four or five years ago, it'd probably be more like 50 or 60%. I was working maybe 30 to 40 hour work week.

I'm with you. I work quote part time. But I feel like it's not the most appropriate moniker for what you and I are trying to do, which is work reasonable hours to do our best work. It's like there would be no sense in trying to cram in more than that part time week. Like to me, part time is the new full time, especially if you run your own business. I just wish I had a different term for it because it somehow when we say that it feels less than, but it isn't. It's actually harder to have systems and be so disciplined about your MVAs to get to that part time.

Yeah. And that is a principle that I teach to people when they're first starting this out. And I think this is a good starting point for anyone to do this. Ask yourself, what is your finish line? What is the time of day that you're going to commit to, to stop no matter what? Sometimes a great work ethic gets in the way of true success with a small business. Meaning you go, I'm going to work as long as it takes to get this, this done. I'm going to work long hours because I am a hard worker. But when you do that, let's say that you allow yourself to work till 11pm 12pm you're promoting sloppy productivity when you do that because you're missing out on, I like the word you use, discipline the systems. You're missing out on the improvements that your business needs to function without you having to be there all the time. So if let's say that that has been your condition. You've been working till 11. Let's set the finish line to 10, and let's see what happens if you have to force yourself to stop at 10. What needs to change? And at this point, you know, I'm forcing myself to finish midday, finish around noon. What has to change to get my business to that point? But I didn't just jump to that. I had to just keep whittling it down from six to five to four to three, and now all the way down to noon. And every time I've done that, the business has gotten stronger and I've made more money.

So good. And that's the piece that people probably feel the most skeptical of. But the way you phrased it right now is so clear that actually in doing that, that's what your business needs in order to grow. And then hearing you say, even in practice, in reality, you have earned more.

Yes.

As a result of those incremental changes.

Yes. You know, I have another book called the Focus Business, and I talk about how a lot of business owners build blue sky into their business. And if you're not familiar with Blue sky, it basically is the value of your business that is entirely attributable to you as the business owner. Meaning if I sold your business to someone else, what am I really getting if you're not there? And the more a person makes themself indispensable to their business, the more BS Blue sky that business is full of. In order to raise the value of your business, you must focus on making it less dependent on you, not more.

That is so true and so counterintuitive as well. And I always say in my business, every single person's job is to make ourselves replaceable every day, including me. So I never, you know, I don't want team members to feel bad like, hey, okay, your job is to make yourself replaceable every day through documentation and getting better and automating things. But I say, even mine, even my job is to make myself replaceable and not see myself as some special flower that can only do all the things you know, But. But I think it is interesting to juggle that blue sky with our MVAs. So there are certain qualities in life that I am uniquely, let's say, qualified to do. I don't know if that's the, you know, just this zone where we're each kind of living our purpose, but at the same time in the business itself, to make ourselves completely replaceable. It seems almost like a paradox that we Hold.

Yeah, this is gonna sound a little cold, but it's basically, how much would it cost you to replace? But basically it's how much would it cost to replace you per hour? Meaning if I had to go hire someone on upwork or someplace else, how much am I going to have to pay to replace Jenny Blake to do those particular things? There are some things in there that are going to be $12 an hour. Some are going to be 50, some are 150. My guess is there's a portion of what you do that's several thousand per hour or more. Those are the ones we don't want to touch right now. We'll get there eventually. Right now, we want to touch everything below that. And there's plenty of room for improvement for anyone listening to it, even me.

Okay, so when would you go after those multiple thousand dollar, like top of the pyramid or whatever metaphor we're using? When would you actually. Is there ever a point, barring selling your business, where you would say, okay, like in your case, Dave, creating valuable training or delivering it, where you actually would bring someone in and replace you or conceptualize that?

Well, if you get to that place, the first question you want to ask is, what do I want out of life? Sometimes a business owner doesn't want to replace that simply because they built the business for the purpose of them living the life that they want to live. And I would never encourage someone to remove that. Right. Your business, if it gives you joy to do those things, then don't replace them. Replace everything else. But if we're to the point where you're thinking, I want a sellable asset, then you keep working on your business until you get it to the point of one or two things that are left. Then ask the hard question, who else could do this in my stead, There's a principle I like to talk about with entrepreneurs called the kite and the string. And every entrepreneur, they're like the kite. They're flying high. They've got these great ideas. Without the string, the kite doesn't really soar. And the string is that yin to your yang. That's the person who builds systems, who thinks structurally, who's more organized than you. And the most successful small business exits I've seen are when the entrepreneur finally finds that person to take over those responsibilities. They are consistent. You can count on them. And they're highly intelligent and well trained. When I've seen entrepreneurs exit, it's when they've brought that person in to take that over for them.

And I think of that, I did a lot of really interesting reading. One of my book binges on exits. And I feel like it's something that we don't really talk enough about in the small business press. Maybe in the big venture world there's all these like, you know, you have to have a good exit for your investors and your employees and founders. But in the smaller business, it is fascinating. Especially I loved John Warlow's Built to Sell and he just came out with the art of selling your business. And I do think there would be a certain nirvana like state where you have that person you just described who really the string, who's who helps with all the operations and that even the owner, if you're doing work that you love, that it's always optional. It's icing on the cake. Like, Dave, if you want to create a new valuable training, you can, but you don't have to. To keep the lights on in the business, there's either someone else helping with that or as you've done already, you've generated such a beautiful body of work and recurring cash flow and business model that it becomes optional. That to me is like small business success.

Your goal is to get the business to the point of mastery, where it's predictable and automatic, where you know what you're going to get out of the business consistently, every day, every week, every month. Then at that point, then you can look at exit, or you can follow the example, those people I mentioned before, like Mark Cuban and Barbara Cochran, and then start to diversify. That's the point where you can start to expand your portfolio.

And that's the whole thing about once you get to that point of mastery, predictable and automatic. It's like the irony that you can sell but you may not want to because it's so predictable and automatic and you're doing the work that you love. And yeah, I just love how clear you are on all of this. So, last question, Dave, if you could give listeners permission, if you could just write them a permission slip, what would it be for?

I would give them permission to make mistakes. Mistakes are wonderful and they're great things. You know, I get examples from simple places and one of my favorites is Bob Ross, right? And everyone knows that Bob Ross said, we don't make mistakes. We have happy accidents. And your day, your business is filled with them. And it's okay when things go wrong. The best thing to do with it is to either make art out of it or learn from it.

So beautifully said. Permission to make mistakes. I feel like I always agree when I hear someone say that. And then when you're the one in the business making the mistake, it's a lot harder.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh. Thank you so much Dave Listeners, you can check out the Myth of multitasking wherever you buy your books. And Dave, where else would you like to send people to learn more about your work and keep in touch?

Well, you know I'm a big fan of LinkedIn, obviously, so I would love it if everyone listening to this followed me there. If you go to here's a quick link linkdave.com that'll take you right to my LinkedIn profile and just hit follow.

Amazing. I'll put that in the show notes along with everything else we've mentioned. Dave, so fun to just dive more into your mind and hear about how you think about things, which is also I just have to share for listeners that you had a doctor tell you long ago that you were off the charts adhd. So to have come to this point and have harnessed this part of yourself and your personality and do the work that you do teaching this, it just makes it all the more impactful. Thank you so much. If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show, and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful, and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time, even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun, and build with love.