Ari Meisel On Productivity Secrets Of The Most Effective People In The World - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #168

Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

And here we are on an episode that I'm actually really excited to do. And the reason I'm really excited to do it is the. The person that we're about to have as a guest is. I've spent probably three hours on the.

Phone with him in the last, I.

Don'T know, five days. I've read his book, which is called Less Doing More Living Make Everything in Life Easier. His name is Ari Meisel. And Ari, how are you, man?

I'm doing great, Joe. Thanks for having me on. Thanks, Dean.

This could perhaps be the very best day of Dean Jackson's entire life right now. We'll see.

It really could be. Yeah.

I'm going to read some off the back of your book and then I'll give you my intro of how I came about you. But says Ari Meisel has turned his hobby optimizing productivity into a popular framework and consulting service for automating and outsourcing life's tasks. His less doing philosophy continues to grow in popularity and has become a platform for general efficiency consulting to businesses, entrepreneurs, and others who could use a little more time in their lives. He lives in Long island with his wife, their three children, and two dogs. Do you have any other pets, like an iguana or anything weird like that?

No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. We have enough living creatures here as it is and enough testosterone in the house. Okay, cool.

So here's the deal. Vern Harnish, my friend sent me a copy of your book, and it's a small book and I read it and I loved it and I highlighted it and it's even got a testimonial from my genius network member and friend, David Bak that says Ari Mizel's philosophy in Less Doing, More Living is a true gem. Simple, fun, and technologically up to date the 21st century. And David actually put us in touch with each other because I was with him a few weeks ago and he made a phone call and left you a message and said, we gotta connect. So next thing I know is you're actually helping me personally with some of my productivity things based around what you teach people in your truly fantastic book. I mean, Tim Ferriss is a good friend of mine. I've helped him with a lot of his books. I've read David Allen from Getting Things Done is a friend of mine. I've worked with a lot of organizational experts, productivity people, and this is my new favorite productivity book. Because it's small, it's simple, it's powerful. And even just what you've helped me with personally is pretty mind blowing. And so that's what I want to get into today.

Who are you?

How did this come about? And then we'll get into some specifics that will help our listeners with just being better versions of themselves.

Well, I mean, wow. First of all, thank you, Joe. That's really quite a compliment. So I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. Started my first company when I was 12 doing website design, and then I had a couple other tech companies before I graduated high school. I went to college at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated a year early with a degree in real estate and entrepreneurship and minors in art history and psychology and went into construction. So I never had sort of a traditional path to anything. And I was working in construction in upstate New York, developing these old buildings, and it was amazing. And I've basically been a real estate developer for the past 12 or 8 years or so. The deal was that anybody who worked on the job had to teach me their trade. So I really was learning every trade there was. And it was very hard work and it was a lot of fun and it was an amazing time in my life. But I essentially broke my body and just was burning the candle at both ends and overstressing. And I was. I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. I was eating McDonald's twice a day. I was just doing everything wrong. And When I was 24 or 24, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is a chronic inflammatory condition that affects the digestive tract. It's considered to be very. It's considered to be incurable. It's very painful and not really well understood. So I was put on a lot of medicine and I was kind of getting sicker and sicker until one really bad night in the hospital, I decided that I had to do something different. And I went on this long journey of self tracking and self experimentation. And after about four months, I was off my meds. And four months after that, I competed in my first triathlon. And then I set my sights on Ironman France, which was to be a year and a half later. And along the way I realized that I had pretty much figured out the nutrition and I figured out the supplements, but there was still this big element of stress. And stress that was not only affecting my illness, but affecting everything basically in general. And my response to that was to create a new system of productivity which I would call less doing, as in less doing, more living. And the rest is sort of history.

So, Ari, when you were going through Crohn's disease and you were competing in Ironman, and you went through this whole transition, you did it out of necessity, out of survival, versus just being inspired to learn about productivity. And a lot of people that won't adopt a new skill or a new habit, it's in a lot of cases because they don't have to. I mean, they're in a comfortable state. Things are good, but they're not completely chaotic. What sort of things did you need to understand and learn before you can make that big shift? Because we're going to talk about some skills and some habits and some things that people can adopt. But I think just acquiring the mindset is critical in the very beginning. So what needed to transform in your own mind for you to turn this into action?

I basically had to stop being completely helpless. And it wasn't a familiar feeling for me. Basically. I think what had happened, what had led to this was this real estate development that I did. In the end, the first one that I did in upstate New York, in the end, it turned out good and okay. And everything that I know about real estate, I learned from that project. But at the time, I had. I mean, I was just under so much stress. I was just pushing myself so hard. I had $3 million of debt when I was 23 years old. I mean, there was like. It was bad. And I think it just sort of set me up to be in this state of, like, being a cage. Not a caged lion, but like a zoo animal that had lost its ability to hunt and fight. Because, you know, I've always been pushing myself and motivated and starting companies and finishing college early and all this stuff. So that, I think precipitated it, because the problem with something like Crohn's is it's a young person's disease. In retrospect, I was actually a little old when I got diagnosed. A lot of people get diagnosed in their teens, and it's really hard because the first doctor that diagnosed me did it on voicemail. He left me a voicemail and said, you know, oh, your testerols came back and you have Crohn's disease, and you're going to have to take these eight different medicines and, you know, call me if you have any questions. And I had that message, and I'm sitting on my couch, and I was just. It was like I just had the wind knocked out of me. And then basically every time I'd go to the doctor after that, you know, every time I went in it was like, okay, you're going to need to take another medicine and you're going to take another medicine. And this, you know. So it just kept getting worse. I just kept like taking it and it was almost like learned helplessness until this one bad night in the hospital, basically where it was like, I'm going to die, I'm going to die. So if I get out of this, I have to do something. And I got out of the hospital that night or that morning and spiked 105 degree fever for no apparent reason and basically was delirious for another 24 hours. And finally I was just like, okay, I'm going to start from the beginning and do the exact opposite of what I've been doing, which turned out to be a totally different diet. And a big part of it, which was really the basis for Less Doing, now that I connect this all together, was that I had all this data. I'd been getting blood tests like every four to five weeks, which is a lot, obviously. I had colonoscopies, I'd had dual X ray absorption scans. If there was a test, I had it done on my body. And I had all this data that I was just putting away and putting away and putting away. I was like, look, let me see if I can do something with this. So I started to analyze my blood test and look for patterns and I had no idea what I was doing except how to use Excel, basically. And I started to look for patterns and things. And that's when I started to experiment on myself a little bit. And honestly, the things that I think that I thought that were working at the time, they probably helped, but those weren't the ultimate solutions that I believe I came up with. But just having some sort of ownership over the situation was really huge. And just that self awareness, and that's really the first fundamental of what's doing is about self tracking because there's just so much going on in our lives that we lose track of everything. Totally, totally. Yeah.

Well, that's pretty powerful. So let me just go kind of right into it about what you talk about in the book, Less Doing and the website, I want to let everyone know, is lessdoing.com is that correct, Ari?

Yeah, absolutely.

We're going to say that subliminally many times, just so people, even if they don't wait, they won't even realize that they're just going to wander to Amazon or they're going to go to your site, they're going to buy your book and that sort of stuff. So you talk about optimizing, automating and outsourcing. So if you could talk about what's the difference between optimizing automating and outsourcing? Because that's sort of what you teach.

Yeah, sure. So it's funny, actually. So, you know, Dean had actually mentioned something about this before, the call that, you know, he's done a lot of the things with processes and teams, but the automation stuff was really interesting to him. And that's what a lot of people end up doing when they think that they want to be more efficient, is that they'll get a team in place and basically just offload. And that doesn't make it more efficient. I outsource hundreds of things pretty much daily, but that's never the first step, because outsourcing an inefficient task does not make it more efficient, and eventually that pipe will back up. So basically it is this overarching theme of optimize, automate, outsource. And what that means is you start with the optimization. So you actually have to look at the problem and look at what's going on and really identify how you're spending your time, your resources, your energy, and how you do the things you do. There's something I have in there called creating the manual of you. And the thing is that people go through processes usually on a daily basis, but if not weekly or less often. But there's things that we repeat and then we get in this autopilot mode, which is great because our brains are really efficient. But at the same time, that's the problem when people are like, oh, it'll just take me a minute, or when they say, oh, it'll take me longer to explain this than to actually just do it myself. It's like, no, people don't realize the opportunity cost when you take just a minute to do something that you shouldn't be doing, because it takes you about 20 minutes to get back to what you should be doing and get back in that sort of flow. 95% of the things that you do on a daily basis, you, me, Dean, everybody can be done by other people and other things. It's that 5% that only you can do and do better than anybody else that you should be able to focus on. So the optimization is really breaking down the problem and cutting away the fat and really identifying the process and right away usually make it more efficient. I mean, of course you make it more optimal because of the optimization. The second part is automation. And with automation, we're really looking at this in the mindset of set it and forget it. So this is things that it could be people, but it's usually processes or software things that will just run in the background and do the things that you need to do. And a lot of times, especially nowadays with the way the technology improves, you can stop there and you don't even have to go to the outsourcing part. But if you do have something left over that you couldn't automate away, that's when I finally looked at outsourcing it to specialists or generalists. So it really is an important process. But it's amazing to me because every week there's some new way to automate things that doesn't require human interaction at all, which is how you become scalable and foolproof.

Yeah, it's fascinating to watch. I mean, we have a concept we've been talking about on a couple of our out of marketing episodes of this frustration, the kind of feeling that most entrepreneurs hit when they're trying to do it all. And we call that trying to be a self milking cow. And you know, all these things are that are technical that other people could do if this cow had some farmers, a farm operation, you know. So we're looking at just the making the milk is the thing that the cow does the very best, which would be that 5% what you were talking about, the things that only you can do, you know, and that the only thing that you know what the cow can do better than anybody else is make the milk and farmers can do the milking, processing, packaging, taking the market, all that stuff. And this is really just completely congruent with all of that. So I'm really excited to have you on.

Well, thank you very much. And by the way, finding out what that 5% is is pretty magical. You know, in my case, my 5% is basically curating content and creating content and everything else beyond that is not something that I need to be doing or should be doing. Well, there you go.

Well, you know, I have a thing that I've taught for years and I fall into this trap in other areas where I when I learned how to automate marketing and how to replicate a salesperson by the creation of. In the beginning, because there was no Internet consumer awareness guides, sales letters, 24 hour free recorded messages, I started calling those ELF marketing systems easy, lucrative and fun versus half hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. And a lot of people have half businesses which could be hard, annoying, lucrative and frustrating or hard, annoying, lame and frustrating versus an elf easy, lucrative and fun and so when I can find any other methodologies or ways to make other areas of my life elf all the better. Now in your book you basically have it broken into nine fundamental principles that make up your left doing system. It is a system and I'd love to have you just kind of go through those so people can understand how it all fits together.

All the different pieces of. I'm sorry, of which of the nine fundamental principles? So there are nine fundamentals and the first one is called the 8020 rule, but it's really about self tracking. Honestly, I named these three years four years ago and I kind of wish I could rename some of them, but I can't at this point. So it's about the 8020 rule and it's not the typical, it's not the Tim Ferriss style 8020 rule. It's certainly not the Pareto original 8020 style. For me, 8020 is really a reminder to be constantly self tracking. So everything I do, everything you do, everything we all do can be tracked nowadays. Honestly, it's so easy. You don't have to think about it, whether it's the steps you've taken or the people you've talked to, the number of times you've send an email. So for instance, and I always love asking this, I always ask this when I give talks in person. But you're west coast right now, but it's nighttime. So do you remember what you had for breakfast this morning?

I do actually.

Okay, you don't have to tell me, but that's good. Do you remember? And I know the answer to this one too. Do you know how many emails you sent last Tuesday?

No, I don't.

Okay, you do because you were helping me. Right?

Yes.

Right. Every time I ask that in a room with people, usually 90% of the people raise their hands for the breakfast one and then nobody raises their hands for the email one. And the thing is it's like, okay, well maybe that doesn't matter. But it probably does because if I were to look at your email habits, I could probably tell you what your most efficient days are. I could tell you that Tuesdays are more efficient than Fridays, for instance. And knowing that, that probably means that you should schedule some more important creative work or maybe even administrative work on Tuesdays and not put those things to Fridays because that's sort of a recipe for not getting it done or not getting it done well, but it goes way beyond that. If you find out that, I mean you can go as deep as finding out how certain people affect your productivity or your sleep. Just by having lunch with someone, you can see that maybe you eat less healthy and then that you're in a worse mood and you have a fight with your spouse and you don't drive as well. Like all of these things can be tracked and correlated if you really want to. And without doing anything either. That's the point. So the 8020 rule or the self tracking is really, really key to all of us because again, it just brings back that self awareness to something that we've really lost. So the second fundamental is the biggest one, it's the meatiest one. And it's called creating the external brain. So the idea here is that there is simply too much going on, as I said. And the brain is great at coming up with ideas, but it's terrible at processing them or hanging onto them, or even worse, executing upon them. And the way this sort of came to me was that in high school I was coming up with a new business idea every single week. And most of them were terrible. I mean really terrible. But I had the idea, I had the ideas in college. It was marked like they were coming once a month. When I got to college, they were coming a lot less frequently. And then after college, they just stopped. I stopped getting new ideas for things and I kind of just accepted. I was like, I guess my imagination has run out. At 20 years old. That's it. I used it up. And of course I didn't take into account the fact that I was not sleeping really well or barely, and I wasn't eating well and I wasn't taking care of myself and I was way too stressed to even come up with new ideas, much less do anything about them. So basically, the external brain, at a very simple level, is about note taking and getting ideas out of your head as quickly as you possibly can without any judgment or any hesitation. And the best application to do this is Evernote. So Evernote, if you don't know it, you know people don't know it, is a free service that's web based or iPhone based, or Android is everywhere basically and syncs across everywhere. And you can take notes in the form of text, pictures, audio, web clippings, anything you want. And the idea is with something like Evernote, and it's free by the way, is to overuse it. If you have an idea in your head, you have to get it out of your head, because ideas need flow. And if you get nine, quote unquote bad ideas out of your head, the tenth one may be amazing. And that could be because Those nine added up to the great idea, or it could simply be because they got out of the way of the good idea. I always love to refer to this Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns was diagnosed with everything. He was at the Mayo Clinic, and the doctor says, you are the sickest man in the world. You have every single disease. And he goes through this list of ridiculous diseases. He said, but you're indestructible, basically, because you have this. He shows this little doorway and all these fuzzy little animals that represent the viruses and bacteria, and they can't get through the door because there's so many of them. So he's not getting sick. Ideas are very similar. You got to get your ideas into a single file line so you can get them the heck out of your head and be able to get those good ideas down. And Evernote is so beautiful for this because it's searchable, it's contextual, and you can recall that stuff when you need to. And if there's 95% of junk ideas, that's fine. They're just there and they're out of the way.

Well, I think. Do you have stock in Evernote? Are they offering you stock and whatnot?

You know what? It's funny. It's one of the few.

Actually.

It's one of the only companies that I recommend on a regular basis, but I have no relationship with at all.

I think I better change that for you because it's just not fair.

It's not proper. I'm one of their biggest advocates. All right, well, you know, I'm a.

Platinum partner in Singularity University, and I know they're friends with the founder there, so I might have to make a couple phone calls, you know, do the whole Joe Polish relationship nonsense. There you go. Okay, so let's. Yeah, so keep going. No. Do you have any questions or comments, Dean?

No, I think it's. That's a wonderful tool. And just the concept of that. Like, I use Trello to organize all of my thoughts into a place where they're. I have journals, and that's where it all starts, really. I write everything down in journals. And then what I found was that I would. When I go into an idea, and I would, you know, list all these great things that go along with that idea. I was doing a lot of recreating, and I think tools like Evernote, tools like Trello allow you to organize those things, and then you can pick up easily where you left off is what I find with it.

So. Yeah.

Recreating stuff.

Yeah.

I've Been using Nevernote for years. I mean, when I would go to movies, I would literally snap pictures of movie tickets. Just never know because you can pretty much put anything there. And then if I wanted to remember, you know, what movie did I see? Or, you know, it's just very interesting. It's a very cool tool. You can use it for. For a million different things.

Yeah. I mean, just for some idea for. I have business cards that people give me in Evernote. I have every task that I ever assigned to a virtual assistant and all the communication and files that go back and forth, that's in Evernote. Any press clippings, project ideas, all sorts of stuff from my book. And then I even have. Every time I get a check, I take a picture. And I also have a notebook that has pictures of every card that I used to carry in my wallet. I've got about 30 cards that are pictured in there. Everything from insurance to AAA cards that you can now just really show someone a picture and you don't have to carry any of that stuff. Yeah.

You know, even Tim Ferriss, who he uses Evernote to even keep track of things he's gonna write about in his blog and what he's gonna put doing books. So Evernote is a really great productivity tool. Speaking of Tim, both of you guys are speaking at my conference that's coming up, and if you were to get in a physical fight with him, do you think you could take him?

Well, if I say yes, then I'm kind of challenging him, aren't I?

Smackdown. Smackdown.

That's right. This is what I would say is that I think Tim was a. What was it? Chinese kickboxing champion. Knowledge is in Krav Maga. Oh, really? Yeah. So his is probably more damaging, but I think mine's probably more deadly.

Gotcha.

That's good to know. You know, I'll wait till the conference. I might ask that on Ben's stage or something with both of you. That would be awesome. But I'm gonna give you a heads up. Yeah, yeah. If he, you know, just go for his kneecaps or something, if he gets a little out weird or something.

But.

Okay. So keep going, keep going. Keep rolling through the fundamentals.

Okay. Well, so, I mean, the external brain is really the biggest one, and I could actually go on about that for the next two hours, but I'll move through the fundamentals for you and we can come back to external brain if you'd like.

Yeah, yeah. Because I'm going to ask you about to do lists so that'll be my next thing after. I just want people to kind of get an overview of this, and then we'll go into some specifics.

Okay. So the third fundamental is customization, and I'll go through the rest of these kind of quickly. So customization is really the idea that there's all these great products and services available to us in the world, but the thing that is made for everyone is made for no one. So you can actually get things customized for yourself very easily. Now, whether it's custom meal replacement bars or vitamins and supplements to software and services, you can outsource stuff to elance.com, which is the number one, the largest marketplace for outsourcing all sorts of services and goods. You can also go to one of my favorite sites in existence, which is fiverr.com, which is F I V E R R. And it's a website where people will do things for $5. And it goes from the extremely bizarre. There's a really interesting guy named Chris Ferretti who for $5 will call anybody you want as Christopher Walken. And he does a very good job of it. And he's actually been to a couple of my classes in New York City and gotten up and spoken, which is really funny. But you can also get someone who will tweet your Message to their 275,000 followers for $5 on Twitter, or someone who will transcribe 20 minutes of audio for $5. All the transcriptions from my podcast are done with Fiverr. So it's just an amazing, amazing world. The fourth fundamental is called choose your own work week. And what this really boils down to is learning the times that are better for you to do different things. And I really do believe that it really does. The skill to cultivate. It's not about to do lists. It's not about prioritization. It's about timing and learning when is best for you to do any given thing and then sort of managing your life around that schedule and corralling people into that. So there's a number of services that I recommend there. The fifth one, fifth fundamental, is stop running errands. Errands are not efficient. There's absolutely no two ways about it. Errands are not efficient. The only errand that you might want to run yourself and that I'm okay with people doing themselves, is grocery shopping, because some people actually enjoy that and they want to have just the perfect cantaloupe or whatever it is. So everything else you can have taskrabbits do you can get Uber for car service. You can get Postmates to deliver things. You can do Amazon, subscribe and save to have things automatically delivered to your house on schedule so you never have to shop for toilet paper, toothbrushes, batteries, baby diapers, any of that stuff ever again. Save yourself thousands of hours and thousands of dollars. Stop running herbs. You got that, Dean?

I just want to make sure. Dean, really, that is not just hearing it, but he's really understanding it.

The baby. Yeah.

I order my baby diapers on auto ship.

Good. Yeah. Is that who I'm talking about? All right.

I'm very proud of you. So sorry, Ari. Sorry for the interruption.

No, that's fine. In two and a half years, I changed upwards of 2,000 diapers. And I do track.

Man, you even track this stuff. I mean, that's. When you even say that, I mean, I have a sense that you're probably within probably 10 or 20 diaper range of accuracy there because of how your brain works. So that's good.

Do you want the actual number?

Are you kidding me? Let me check Evernote real quick. No, that's great. No, I don't need the actual number. I'll just take your word for it.

Okay, so I don't have the weights of the diapers, so that's probably helpful.

Hold on, let me just have another add tangent here. I started out as a dead broke carpet cleaner, and I transformed the entire carpet cleaning industry by first figuring out how to solve my marketing problems, and I knew how to solve them for other people. And I started teaching that and sharing that, and it worked. And what a lot of people don't realize is that when they rip out their carpet, it actually in many cases will weigh twice as much than what it weighed when they originally installed it because of all the dirt. And if you could imagine everything that would go into a carpet as skin, it actually begins to weigh more. So when you said the whole weight of the diaper, it just reminded me of the weight of carpet. And that's why people need to clean things out in the. The very same way they need to clean out their brain and all this other stuff. So anyway, I was trying to make a segue there that sounded semi reasonable, like it had to do with productivity. But I just needed an excuse to talk about the weight of carpet to encourage people to get their carpets clean on a regular basis. Okay, so that sort of public service announcement is over. We can continue with the fundamentals.

Well, thank you. Actually, that is interesting. And I think 70% of household dust is skin cells.

Yes, exactly. I wasn't going to say the dead skin, but it's because it freaks people out. But that's exactly true.

The sixth fundamental is batching. Batching is really about avoiding this gear shift mentality that people kind of get into where you have an hour, and in that hour you sit down, you start doing some email, and then you switch over to Excel, then you take a phone call, and then you go refill your cup of coffee, and then you talk to somebody, go to the bathroom, come back to Excel a little bit. Basically, the hour goes by, you've done 75 things but actually gotten zero done. So with batching, we're really talking about, first of all, putting together tasks that are similar so that you can do them all at once and sort of get into a groove. And also, again, avoiding that gearshift mentality. So whether that's doing laundry once a week or making all your lunches for the week on a Sunday, which is a really common thing to do when you're looking at this kind of stuff. It's a really efficient way to do things. Or just doing email for the last 10 minutes of an hour, every hour, that's another way. So batching is really important. The seventh fundamental is organization. And my concept and ideas for organization is very simple. It's really about setting artificially restrictive limits and then working backwards from that to find a solution. And the way I came up with this was that I had at one point a closet filled with electronic debris in my house. You know, keyboards, monitors, cables, all sorts of crap. And it was ridiculous. It was a whole closet. And I decided I'm only going to have this one egg crate of stuff. And in order to make that happen, I had to get rid of. I had to actually hire a TaskRabbit to come and put a lot of stuff on ebay, donate stuff, recycle, throw stuff away. And now I have that box, and anytime I want to put something in it, something else has to come out, because that box is my limit. In the same vein, on my computer right now, the only three programs that I have on my computer are Chrome, Dropbox, and Skype. And that's all I allow myself on my computer. I won't install anything else. And even if I'm experimenting with something that's different. But what this means is that if someone stole my computer or my computer blew up for some reason, I could move over to someone else's computer and be up and running in about three seconds with no issues. So it's very, very efficient. The eighth fundamental is finances. And the finances fundamental I sort of had to throw in there, but it's actually become a lot more interesting over the years because there's been so much cool stuff that comes out. So on the one hand there's a big self tracking element here like using mint and just knowing where your money's going and how you're spending things. But it goes beyond that to automatically finding savings and automatically disputing charges on your credit card or finding erroneous charges, finding better deals on flights, all that kind of stuff. And then the ninth fundamental is wellness. And my journey began with wellness, so it might as well end with wellness because no matter how technologically efficient I might be able to make somebody become, if they're not eating well or they're not sleeping well or they're way too stressed, they're simply not going to be as effective as they want to be. So wellness is a really big part of this and that gets into sleep and fitness and nutrition and really the most optimal path to each of those. And then it goes a little bit further into the sort of biohacking stuff and really taking things to the next level.

Well, great. First off, thank you for going through that whole list. That really gives people a good overview. That's why people want to read the book. The book is a really, it's a really efficient book too. I mean there's not a lot of. There's nothing in there that's not really incredibly useful and really well thought through. But I wanted people to get an understanding. This is more than just a to do list. What's really great about it is you don't just give philosophical ideas. You literally tell people, here's what you do, here's how you do it, and here's the website to use or the application or the tools. So you give people a toolkit. Dean, I'm going to keep rolling with questions unless you've got any comments or something because I want to give the appearance that I care about your viewpoint.

I'm excited we're going to get into talk about some of the examples because I've been a big advocate of this kind of thinking for a lot of years. So I'm excited to share.

Yeah, well, awesome.

All right, so what's your philosophy on the famous to do list?

That it is completely anti productive and ruining your brain?

Well, why would you say such a hurtful thing? I mean, look at all these people that have to do lists out there, including myself at times. Until you just really drilled this into my head the other day that there's some like, I can't even. You're going to explain it, I'm sure in a minute. Whatever psychosis they call it that it does to your brain. But explain why no to do list because I know this is going to be shocking for many people to hear how you think about it and the alternative to it.

Yeah, this is always the one that gets people remembering me. So basically in the 1920s, there was a Russian doctoral student in Berlin named Bluma Zeigarnik. She was in a restaurant one day and she noticed that all the waiters were very cognizant of all of the open ended checks, but they had completely forgotten about the checks that had closed out. So she took this and hypothesized and created this whole scenario and basically tested this something else with college students. And she allowed them to study for an exam. And one group was summarily interrupted, sorry, they were sequentially interrupted. And then the other one was allowed to just do what they had to do. The group that got interrupted did significantly better, like statistically significantly better on their exams. So basically what the sort of hypothesis turned into was that there is a separate part of our brains that processes open ended information. We can more easily recall information from that part of our brains. Information that is interrupted goes into that part of our brains. And it's sort of basically the voice in our heads that pushes us to finish things. So just keep that in mind and it makes sense. You know, even the worst procrastinator still enjoys or wants to get things done. So we do have this sort of natural human tendency towards closure. So the problem with to do lists is that if you're an even reasonably busy person, you probably got a dozen, maybe two dozen, maybe 60 things on your to do list. And I don't care if you're using Google tasks or Post it notes or the worst offender for a to do list is the whiteboard. But most of the things on that list are things that you can't do right now. And that's either because they're too big of a project or because you're waiting on someone else to do something. And by too big a project I mean I have seen now seven times on the to do list write book. So that is certainly not a to do list item. And so this is the problem is that you look at that list and you see all those things and the Zeigarnik effect is shouting in your brain being like, I want to finish this, I want to finish This, I want to finish this. But you can't. And all it does is remind you of everything you're not getting done. And that creates what's called cognitive dissonance and basically puts the brakes on any possibility of being productive. And everyone has this experience where they're like, okay, they finish something and they go look at their list and they go up and down the list and up and down the list, okay, I'm going to do this now. It doesn't work that way.

It's terrible.

So basically, you need to get rid of your to do list completely. You don't need it. What you need to do is bring that to do list to your attention only at the time that you can deal with it and deal with it. And the best tool for this is something called Follow up cc, which is my number one productivity recommendation of any tool that I ever use. It's my lifeblood, basically. Follow Up CC is an email reminder service. What it does is you send an email from any place you want, whether your iPhone or your BlackBerry or Outlook or anywhere, and you send the email to whoever you want. And then you put in the BCC field. Three days at follow up CCC or one week at follow up CC or Monday 9pm at followupCC, any time period you want at followup CC. And when that time period comes around, that email will come back to your inbox and it will now have a snooze functionality attached to it. So you can then snooze it even further. This is amazingly powerful because you never again have to worry about following up on an email or remembering to do something at the right time, which is what most of the stress related to email is. It's always about did I get back to them and did they get back to me and did I follow up and did I lose a lead? You can totally eliminate that. So the way that this works for to do lists is that every task, no matter what it is, has a timing associated with it, whether it's a time that it should be started, checked on, or finished. And the key is to be able to bring that to your attention at the best time to deal with it. And the reason that Follow Up CC works so brilliantly for this is because of that news functionality. So let's say I get an email, or even if it's not an email, I just get reminded of something. I can send an email directly to 10:00am Fallout CC or something like that. So I get something in and it's a bill or something related to paperwork. Whatever it might be. So I forward that to Friday 10am at Fallout SCC, and today's Monday night. And then I forget about it. Within five seconds of hitting the send button, I have completely forgotten about it. Now Friday 10am comes along and I'm on a phone call that I wasn't intending to be on. And that email comes in. Now I'm five days wiser. Other things have happened. I've done more stuff. And now that on that Friday, I can say to myself, you know, I'm going to be off this call in about 15 minutes and I can actually deal with this right then. Or maybe I can say, you know what, I don't actually have to deal with this until Monday, and that would be better. Or maybe I can just say, I don't have to deal with it at all anymore. It's no longer relevant. So it's a big difference between procrastinating and deferring. Procrastinating is an emotional feeling where you just don't feel like doing it and you're separating the future self from the present self and thinking that it's the future solves the problem. Deferring is taking a very active role and saying, this is the best time for me to deal with this most effectively. And I'll just also finish with saying that that's why prioritization is total crap as well. Because tomorrow morning, let's say that I get an email from the Daily Beast, who I write for sometimes, or whoever it is, we need this article written tonight. Like, okay, that's my number one technically priority. That's the thing that I really have to get done today. But it's ten in the morning. Me personally, if I try to write anything creatively at 10 in the morning, it either won't happen or it'll be total crap. I know from testing and from experimenting with this kind of stuff that after 8 o' clock at night is when I can do creative work. And as a matter of fact, when we get off of this interview, I know that I have a reminder to write an article that I want to do tonight. So all I'm going to do is forward that to 8pm at Fallout CC and then forget about it and give myself back the headspace that I need to do what I do. And then 8pm comes along. I'm a little bit tired at the end of the day, which actually makes you more creative when you're tired because you're less inhibited and I'm ready to go. So to do lists are out the window.

Well, that's great. That's fantastic. Now, can I ask you a question? We have a friend, Dan Kennedy, who's a marketing guru. I've known Dan forever and. And literally, as hard as this is going to be for many people to believe, he does not use email. So therefore, what do you recommend to someone that just needs to keep track of personal things and professional things and they have an aversion to electronics? Do you have an alternative to that?

Yeah, Well, I mean, does he use a phone or just no email at all?

No email at all. He does not even go online.

It's bizarre.

But he's incredibly productive and he's written some big books on productivity. And Dan, of course, is an anomaly because most people don't operate that sort of way. I'm just using that as an extreme example. Or say, for instance, I go on free days for a week and I'm not going to go online at all during that period of time. I haven't done that in a while where I haven't even looked, you know, personally or whatever. Even on free days, I'll typically still go online if I want to look stuff up. However, there are periods where it's just literally, you know, in December of last year, I went an entire week without looking at a computer and had the cell phone completely turned off for five days. No messages, nothing. Now, that's, of course, you know, putting myself into an isolated sort of state, which is awesome and rejuvenating, but at time, the same, same time. What do you do in situations like that?

Well, so with someone like that, what I would actually say is that you can still use the system, but I would sit down basically at the beginning of the week, or if you have to, the night before, and I would plan out your sort of time slots for the next day, and then I would have that written down on a piece of paper, but you wouldn't look at that. And so basically that day you would say, okay, it's one o', clock, and then go look at what you have planned for one o' clock and really giving yourself tunnel vision. That's really kind of what a big part of this is. Yeah.

You know what I think is great about it, too now, how do you spell the term.

With the ze Garnik?

How do you spell it?

Z, E, I, G, A, R, N.

I, K. Okay, that's just for anyone that really wants to go research it and go deep with it. The thing that I love about this, and I'm in a position right now, and I'LL just be open about it because obviously I wanted to do an interview with Ari because I need this. In a lot of ways, it's very helpful. And that's what me and Dean do. We find things that are really helpful to us and we share them with other people. And if you become more productive, you're going to be a more productive marketer and a happier human being and not suffer as much.

Unless.

Anyway, so I was going to make a comment about Dean, but I'm trying to behave myself while simultaneously trying to develop hopefully a useful podcast episode. I'm in this transition stage now, Ari, where I've got so many things that are to dos that are written down and tasks and immediately going to where there's nothing in my schedule because I've used my schedule to even dump to dos and just keep transferring them to the next day and keep transferring them to the next day. How does someone go cold turkey on this? Or how does someone transition if they say, there's an entrepreneur listening to us that has notepads filled with things, post it notes, whiteboards filled with stuff. What do they do with all of that? Where do they start?

Well, it's really simple. You really just go look at your list and think, and I did this with you. You think, when can I actually do this task? Okay, that's when I'm going to sign it and just put things on time slots. And in the beginning it's going to be a little clogged and it's going to take work. And part of the issue is that a lot of people don't push things off as far as they should. A lot of people try to say, oh, I'll do this tomorrow, but that doesn't work. You have to push things off a few days or sometimes even a week or more. And that's fine because you weren't going to get to it at all if you didn't do it this way. So it's really just a matter of going down the list and really thinking about when you're going to get things done. And remember I did this with you the other day and I was like, no, really, Joe, think about it. When are you going to actually do this? Right. Yeah.

And you know, I should say this too. Me and Dean have talked about this book several times in a different context. But there's a book written a few years ago by Alan Dertowitz called Change or Die. And it talks about how people really make changes easily without, in some cases, not at all, without outside help. And if this is piquing your interest and you're listening to this. I mean, certainly you're going to want to read Ari's book and it's awesome. It really is an awesome book. Secondly, if you do need help, I wanted to reach out to Ari because I wanted to personally learn from him and get training. He actually does have a coaching group where he teaches people how to do this. He has online courses and stuff. So depending on wherever you're at listening to this, we just wanted to introduce you to an individual that has solutions to things that are many, many entrepreneurs that I know, especially the very successful ones, are completely buried in over communication and very overwhelmed. And most people are just not going to admit to how much challenge it is. Many people I know, the first thing they do in the morning is check email. Last thing they do at night is check email. I can't even keep my phone anywhere near me at night because it just has a magnetic draw to me. So I literally, in my house, I keep my phone downstairs. I don't want any electronics near my bed because I just know what it does to my brain and I think it has negative effects to other people's brains. So this sort of stuff is just really, to me, I think it's just.

Really powerful and important.

Anything else?

There's a distinction. I think there's a distinction that what Ari is saying. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he's not saying that you don't need lists of all of the things that you want to accomplish, all of the things that you want to do, but in terms of working from a to do list with this is what I'm going to do today, that may be what you're. Is there a distinction there, Ari?

Yeah, I mean, right. That's a good point to bring up. I have a project list in one of my notebooks in Evernote, but those are big things that I only look in that project list if I have time to do that. And then once I look in that, I see if there is anything that I can make actionable. Usually it is ideas for articles and stuff. So it is actually really helpful that if I know I am going to write an article tonight, which again, I am. I am going to write an article. When we get off this thing, I am just going to go look in Evernote and see what my next six ideas are for articles and write because basically every time I dip in there, I'll either add a little note or something, but it's not staring me in the face. And it's not a task. These are bigger things. These are things that I like to get through and like to do. So it's very different.

We have like, I've set up my system. If I take that, you know, that cow metaphor and continue it on, I've set up my whole organization around that where I've got sort of three areas. We have the, the Trello board that I call the Pastures, which is just for me. And it's just my area to organize all of the things that I want to do, all of the ideas that I have, all the contexts that I work under, like all ideas for podcast episodes or ideas for books or courses. All of those things. I've keep them all organized. But the thing where it actually happens is a board that we call the milking shed. And that's where I'm actually going to come in and produce this milk right now. That's the only place that I keep it very limited. It's only got my next five or six things that are in process. And then we have the processing plant, which is what happens to it all from there. And I don't get involved at all in the, in the processing plant. So I just wander from the pastures to the milking shed. And then my project manager takes everything from the milking shed and interacts with the team and the processing plant. It's just whatever works for you. That's, that's the kind of just having a throughput system where you get it out of your mind. It's kind of a cool thing. I'll say one more thing. We have on our On. I love marketing the very first episodes that we put up. I have a video called the 50 Minute Focus Finder. And it's just a process to go through and get all of the things that are going on in your mind out onto paper initially just to kind of clear your mind. And it's a really kind of freeing thing. And what I often find is that people end up in. They're in time debt. You know where you were saying, Ari, with Joe going through that exercise of these are the things and then when can you do that? And sometimes people are in such kind of time debt where they feel like there's all these things that they need to do, are behind on or have deadlines on and to really kind of more granularly look at the reality of it and see how much time is this going to take? When do I have the time to actually do it? Because our idea selves coming up with ideas we can be shapeshifters, you know, we can. It's easier to see something completed and come up with something quickly. But doing requires, you know, a real time perspective. You can only write an article one word at a time.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a good way to frame it.

Well, you know what's interesting too is I'm like, I don't really eat much dairy and well, I'm kind of dairy free. And Dean's always making these cheese and whiskey cookies and cheese and milk. It's really bothersome and I'm not sure kind of how to deal with it because, I mean, I want to be helpful to all of our listeners, but he's just. I mean, it's a very hurtful thing.

I should come up with one for.

Tofu and broccoli or something.

Yeah, you should.

I mean, if you really cared. If you care about the eating habits of our listeners. All right, so let's go into what are some of the key resources someone can start using for optimizing, automating, outsourcing, setting up their external brain that you haven't talked about, or things that you think they just need to know?

Well, I mean, sort of. It's more of a wrap up. The Evernote is huge fault. CC is huge. Really recommend that everybody work with a virtual assistant at some point. And whether or not you have a personal assistant sitting right next to you, it's a learning opportunity for you. If you're dealing with somebody who doesn't know you, isn't there with you, doesn't know how you do things, it's a really interesting parameter to put on yourself in terms of how you effectively communicate your needs. So I really love Fancy Hands for that. And Fancy hands starts at $25 a month for a virtual assistant, which is amazing. So that's a really great way to get started there. And then my book and my podcast and my blog are probably really good resources.

Okay, so let's talk just for a couple minutes about what do you need to know before hiring a virtual assistant? What are some examples of what, how you use them or what you recommend people have a virtual assistant and doing? What are the keys to effectively delegating with a virtual assistant?

Well, so with Fancy Hands, first of all, you're using, I mean, they're vetted, there's quality control, and you're always going to get somebody different. It's what's known as an on demand service. So every time you put a task out anybody in their pool of assistance, which is over 3000 can take it up and do it and move on from it. So there's nothing about training or vetting, and you don't have to worry about that. And it's all centralized through Fancy Hands, which is a New York based company. So it's really good accountability. As far as what you can outsource, the sky's the limit. And it really goes back to what I talked about at the beginning, which is that manual of you. If you create that manual of you, then you can outsource just about anything to anybody. And a really great example, I have 57 processes written out at this point, and they're all in Evernote and they're all shareable, so I can send it to somebody to do. But everything from producing my podcast, to sending a letter, a physical letter, and creating blog posts, to sending invoices and even responding to emails for me with a certain information, a certain format, if it can be done remotely or virtually, they can do it. They can call people for you, they can do research, they can buy things, they can wait on hold and then patch you in for your time. Wonder Bill, if you want, they can do your scheduling, travel, planning, all this stuff that you shouldn't be doing.

Yep.

Well, there you go.

That's fantastic. Okay, so let's talk about tracking. Since you started talking about even your health and your blood tests. So why is tracking so important and how does it affect how we spend our time?

Well, so, I mean, actually blood tracking, blood testing is a big one. And now there's companies that allow you to do your own blood testing. I mean, they still take the blood, but they have their own dashboard and stuff. So I use something. I use a company called Inside Tracker, which gives you this really great graphical dashboard. And it'll show you your numbers over time. And just something as simple as knowing that you're deficient in vitamin D or low in testosterone or you have high inflammatory markers. Those are sometimes just the knowledge is enough to help you make that change. And those can be, you know, besides quality of life, they can just affect the way you perform cognitively. Sleep tracking is a great one. There's a sleep tracker called the Beddit B E D D I T. And it's the most amazing sleep tracker I've ever experimented with. You don't wear anything. You put this strip on your mattress and you lay on top of it. And it can get your heart rate, your respiration rate. It'll use your iPhone's microphone to tell you how often, if at all, you snored. So the first time I used. Yeah. So I have not gotten really, really great sleep in a while, mostly because we have three small children. So I've optimized it as much as I can and I obviously am able to function on a high level, but it's not really great. So the first night I used the bed at and they have this whole metric and they give you a sleep score. The first night I used the bed, it, my sleep score was 32 out of 100, which is obviously terrible. And I actually got 2 hours and 47 minutes of sleep that night. So two weeks later my score was 98. And honestly, I really didn't do much different except for being aware of it and my snoring was reduced and my sleep quality was improved. I'm able to fall asleep in an average of eight minutes. Wow. What was the name of that app again?

Ari?

It's actually a physical device called Beddit. B, E, D, D, I, T. Okay, Beddit.

Okay.

But then if you want to do like activity tracking, you can get the basis watch. It's called my basis, which is really, really advanced. It uses optical technology basically to. To monitor your blood. Well, your blood oxygenation, basically, and how your pulse is, your skin temperature, how much you're sweating, which is really great because it can tell the difference between you sitting on a couch in your living room and you sitting in a sauna sweating your butt off and actually having your heartbeat go crazy. So it's really, really advanced.

You know, my money is a founder of. My basis is in my Genius network group. I was an investor in the company and then of course, they just sold the company for a bunch of money and my stock doubled.

So that was good. It's pretty good. One of the biggest biohacks or recommendations I always make for sleep is blue light Spectrum rather affects our ability to produce melatonin by a lot, by up to 30% usually. And you get blue light from your iPhone, from your TV, from your screens, from your Kindle, all that stuff. So rather than telling somebody to turn off all their electronics an hour before you go to bed, which is very hard to do for someone who's high achieving and stuff, I recommend people get an $8 pair of blue blocking sunglasses off of Amazon and wear those for an hour before you go to bed, I kid you not, you will sleep better the first night you try them. Nowadays if I put them on, I don't make it more than 15 minutes. I just pass out. Because basically it's signaling your body that the. The sun has Gone down and it's time to go to bed. But you can still look at your iPhone. What?

It's just so funny. Our good friend Joe Sugarman was the inventor and sold the blue blocker sunglasses. And that would be perfect.

Well, what's funny is Ari, he's going to be at the event that you're speaking at here too, because Joe I've known forever and so, like, I should just get Joe to give blue blockers out to everyone at Genius Network at the annual event, which he'll do because he loves me, but not in that sort of way, so don't start thinking weird. No, but it's almost like everything Ari's saying is like a setup, Dean.

Right.

I know.

It really is.

It's crazy.

And the next thing you know is.

Joe's Piranha marketing program. If you listen to that before you go to bed, you're going to wake up twice as effective.

If you listen to one Isle of Marketing episode for the next 163 nights.

While you brush your teeth, you will stop procrastinating. Sorry, Ari. Let me digress. Okay, so that's why Dave Asprey always has those weird glasses on, right?

Yeah. And, I mean, he wears those all day, I think, because, I mean, it does, actually. It makes things sort of less intense in terms of like, barraging you with light. But I primarily use them for sleep.

Yes, that's a good point. What else? What else?

What else?

On that subject, I mean, I can keep asking you questions. We can do this all week, but we won't.

No. So for sleep, that's a really big one. For nutrition, my big thing with nutrition is going really high fat, high good fat and low sugar. So I don't really have a diet per se, but that's really what I focus on because I think that the good fats are really satiating. They fuel your brain. They're very anti inflammatory. And then sugar is just processed sugar. I like raw honey very much, but basically I'm always experimenting with how I eat, so that's always kind of a fun thing for me. And then fitness wise, I'm extremely efficient with the way that I do fitness. I basically work out once a week for an hour with a couple friends, and I do a couple movement things every morning. But essentially less is more. It's really about figuring out your goals. And everything I do, like everything I do is so that I can basically spend as much time as possible with my kids.

Well, and that's where it is, getting all your priorities straight. So Yeah, I guess if you're clear on that, then I think one of the reasons why a lot of people feel like they don't know what to do or they feel completely lost is if you're completely fatigued and you're tired and you're overwhelmed and you don't have any space, then it's really hard to even determine what to do. And so some people get in states where they're so busy they're beyond capable. I mean, they've lost the ability to even make decisions because they're so damn tired. So if a person can really free themselves up from that and they can take a, you know, put on a new pair of glasses per se and just take a whole different approach, your life can and will dramatically change.

There is also decision fatigue. You know, we make thousands of decisions every day. Everything from, you know, what we're going to wear to what we're going to eat to who we're going to fire. And that's exhausting, you know, and that's why it's hard to do that stuff at the middle of, you know, like the afternoon. That's a lot of times when people are so tired, it's very hard. So the more that we can automate and not have to think about and not have to make decisions about, the better we're going to be.

You know, as part of the thing.

Joe, that I made this phrase of time bankruptcy and some of the things like what I find with people when they go through and do that 50 minute focus finder and get the big list of all the things that are running around in their brain that they have to do or in completions kind of thing, and looking at the reality of how much time that's going to take them is to go through individually at those things and to look and see, is this really a priority? Is this something that I have to do? Is there any way I could declare time bankruptcy on this and just be done with it? And sometimes just, you know, people can have this whole list of things that they can just let go of. It just immediately gives you a sense of freedom in a sense of being able to move forward unencumbered by all of that. You know, because you often have things that you got a lot of things that feel like they're all top priority. You know, it needs to be done right away. But when you kind of granularly look in on them, you realize, well, I don't. That doesn't really have to be done today. And, you know, realizing when it has to be done and what the time's going to take to do it. And sometimes just clearing the deck, it might take a period of time to catch up before you start introducing new things. But looking at them and seeing, putting them through Ari's filter of how can we optimize it and how can we automate it or delegate it, you know?

Yeah, no, I hear you.

I don't know if I agree with any of what you said, but I hear you. And that's a joke, by the way. You don't. Yeah, like more of a sort of automated response here would be helpful.

Exactly.

It's a reflex, right?

Yeah, totally. All right, we're at the point now, Ari, where you have any famous last words, any final suggestions? Because I want you to share with all of our listeners. How can people learn more about you, get your books, programs, and if they even want to work with you personally, this will be the icing on the.

Cake here.

The sugar free, high fat, healthy protein cake. I guess.

The main thing is that people should realize that there's always a way to be more optimized. You can always free up more time. That's the goal. The goal of everything that I teach and everything I tell people is so that they can free up time, so that they can stress less and do the things that they really want to do. And I really believe that everybody has this, some sort of like magic inside them that a lot of times they're just in their own way and that stuff can't come out. So if they can do this stuff, then some real amazing stuff will come out of them. So yeah, as far as finding out more, the main site for everything is lessdoing.com my blog, the podcast, everything is there. If you want to shortcut that and be even more efficient, you can go to lessdoingpodcast.com if you go to lessdoingbook.com that will take you right to the Amazon page to get the book. And then as far as working with me, I have a mastermind and I basically do group coaching in a mastermind format. And it's been really, really great. Really good group of people doing some amazing things with their lives right now. So that's@lessdoingmastermind.com and then I also have the lessdoinguniversity.com, which is my membership site that has at this point, I think about 85 videos on it, different courses, different pro content that I put up there, my books, a question and answer forum. Really there's sort of every kind of flavor for people to work with me. That's awesome. That is awesome.

Well, you created an awesome book, my friend, and you're a smart guy. And I know this is going to really help a lot of our listeners. So what I'd like to do is suggest to all of our I love marketing listeners to get the book. Do it right now.

Read it.

You'll love it. Give us your comments on ilovemarketing.com what did you think of this interview? Share this interview with anyone you know that's overwhelmed or not as productive, as effective as they could be. I actually bought a copy of Ari's books and gave it to every one of my team members at my company and I've shared it with quite a few people. And of course, Ari is going to be speaking to all of my Genius network members at our annual event. So I'm doing my darndest to share this with the world because I know it's really helpful. So this will not be the last time you hear about Ari. And I will keep people up to speed with kind of what I as I continue to develop my skills in this particular area. And that's just what Batman does, you know, when you have to kind of do the thing. Me and Dean have this already babad and rabbit joke. So, like, we have people that Dean tends to not publicly seem as cruel as I do. People will go back and forth as he's Batman and Robin and that sort of thing. But anyway, what are your thoughts on that, Dean?

I just love to watch it unfold.

So thank you, Ari. Fantastic. And really appreciate it. Looking forward to hearing what everyone gets out of this and talking to everyone on the next episode of I Love Marketing.

We'll see you in a couple of weeks.

Thanks, guys.