How To Multiply Your Time & Income w/Rory Vaden EP 1133

This is episode number 1133 on how to multiply your income and time with Rory Vaden.

Welcome to the School of Greatness.

My name is Lewis Howes, a former.

Pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an.

Inspiring person or message to help you.

Discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today.

Now let the class begin. Peter Drucker said, Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else. And Michael Jordan said, Sometimes things may not go your way, but the effort should be there every single night. My guest today is Rory Vaden, a good friend of mine who's also a New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of Brand Builders Group, which is one of the leading personal brand strategy firms that focuses on helping people become the type of person that everyone wants to do business with. I've worked with Rory for many years now, and we thought it would be valuable to come together and record multiple episodes, a series on building a reputation and personal brand to help you take your life to the next level. And this is the second part of our series, which I'm excited to share with you. And in this episode, we discuss the strategies that will help you multiply your time, how to overcome the common struggles with time management that so many people go through, the unseen consequences of not prioritizing your time and your life, how to set up automation systems that will help you dramatically in your life and in your business and how to develop a growth mindset. And if you've been thinking about taking your life and business to the next level, you need accountability and to surround yourself with other high performing conscious Achievers, which is why I'm excited to share that my greatness coaching program has opened back up and spots are going to be filling up fast. So make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash coaching to learn more about how to have more accountability, more growth in your business and in your life. And if you're inspired by this episode at any moment, make sure to share this with someone that you think would love to hear this as well. You can copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this podcast or go to the full show notes for more information at lewishouse.com/1133. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Rory Vaden.

There are some things that are just.

Getting better at home.

Sleeping in your own bed, watching movies on your own couch without running out of popcorn, the list goes on. And sometimes all you want to do is the things you want in the comforts of your own home, sweet home. And Peloton delivers a workout experience that you'd never imagined was possible without even leaving your home. Now, don't get me wrong, I love a good workout at the gym, but taking into account the time it takes to plan out my workout for the day, commute to and from the gym, and sometimes wait for machines to be open, getting to the gym can't always be included in my busy schedule. Peloton makes it easy to pick up an already created workout that pushes me and be cheered on by live high fives from a hardworking community. from my own home. And the Peloton instructors are incredible, especially Ali Love. Her workouts always kick my butt, and she has an incredible energy that keeps me pumped. With the Peloton bike, there's nothing like working out from home. Learn more at onepeloton.com New members can try Peloton classes free for 30 days at onepeloton.com/app. Terms apply. That's O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com.

Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about our guest, my friend, Rory Vaden is in the house.

Good to be here.

Good to see you, man. And there has been a lot of anxiety and stress and overwhelm in the last years for people with hustle culture, with needing to grow, needing to have more, needing to accomplish more and achieve more faster. comparison of what other people are doing and this desire to create and grow and build and yet people say, I feel like I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time to do all the things I want to do. It's a very first world problem. I don't have enough time. And today we want to talk about the habits of high performers and how they can increase their productivity and multiply their time. And is there a way with all the tools and all the distractions and all the social media and all the apps and all the responsibilities that we have in our life, is there a way to multiply time and to become more productive?

Yeah, yeah there is. So, I mean, this is what you just described was my life. I mean, this was pretty much like all the things we study. I was not trying so much to solve the problem for the world. I was trying to solve a problem in my own life. Just busy, buried, behind, overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated. no matter how fast you work, you just never feel caught up.

No matter how many hours you didn't sleep, you felt tired and you were working sluggish and trying to get it all done, everything.

Yeah, you just can't, there's this frustration of like, am I ever gonna have peace? Like, am I ever gonna have margin? Am I ever gonna have space? Just feeling like things are under control. And so we started looking at this and we started profiling people that at the time we called ultra performers, which were the top one percenters in different industries.

Is this top 1% earners, top 1% accomplishments?

Yeah, I mean, just what, it's kind of used that term loosely, but like, you know, if it's church leaders, it's large, you know, large church leaders. If it's athletes, it's professional athletes. If it's financial advisors, they're probably top earners. Sure, sure. So it's just from different walks of life. And what we found is there is a new type of thinker that has emerged that is, we call them a multiplier. Because most people, are trying to manage time, right? Like you even hear this, you go, I need to be better at managing my time.

Time management.

But you know, what's funny about that is there is no such thing as time management. There is only self-management. You cannot manage time. Time ticks on second by second. I can't fast forward time. I can't stop it. I can't pause it. And so, what this conversation really about is managing ourselves, managing our decisions, managing our use of time. But even that is kind of a first shift that needs to happen is it's not like I'm this helpless victim that is subject to the world around me who is unfairly blasting me with all this stuff. No, you're in charge. Everything that exists in your life, you either said, you said yes to it in some way. So it is your responsibility and you created the problem, but that also means that you are in charge of fixing it, that you have the power to change it. But what we started to realize is that most of what people have learned and think about time management, I went so far and as the opening line in my TED Talk is, I said, everything you know about time management, is wrong. It's wrong because we have been taught to think about time in a very linear way. And the world today is much more like multidimensional.

When you mean linear way, do you mean focusing on our priorities?

Yeah. So a little bit about that. So if we talk, we love to take people on a quick history of time management theory. Okay? era one time management thinking was very one dimensional. We refer to era one thinking as efficiency. So that was the strategy was I got 10 things on my to-do list. How do I crank them out faster? And time management and productivity as a body of work really develops like it comes on in the scene in like 1950s, 60s. So, you know, it's the manufacturing era where it's conveyor belts and engineering and just doing things faster. That also reflected in our mindset was how can I be more efficient? Now, efficiency is good. All things being equal, doing things faster is great. The problem is that there is a point of diminishing returns to using efficiency as your only strategy for productivity. Which is that no matter how fast we move, the amount of busy work always expands to fill the amount of time available.

Right.

So it's more like quicksand. It's just kind of like the faster you go or the more that shows up. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be fast. It's just not gonna get you what you're looking for. Then in the late 80s, Dr. Stephen Covey wrote a book that changed the world, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I'm sure you're familiar with it and sold tens of millions of copies. And Dr. Covey pretty much single-handedly introduced a new era of time management thought that we were, you know, the world refers to as prioritizing. But we would classify prioritizing as Era 2 thinking, which is still to this day the predominant strategy that most people use in terms of how they think about time. And so here's what prioritizing is. It's to focus first on what matters most. Super powerful, super relevant. Dr. Covey had this thing called the Time Management Matrix that he explained of urgency and importance. And basically he taught us to score our activities so that we could reorder them and say, it's not just about getting these done faster, it's saying, hey, item number seven needs to be pushed to item number one, which is valuable. And so that's super valuable. Prioritizing is as important today as ever before. But what I noticed in my own life, because I was a student of Dr. Covey and several books on time, I mean, there's no shortage of books on time management. There's no shortage of apps. There's all these tips and tricks and tools and technology that exist to help us with this problem of feeling so busy. And yet, the majority of us are still overwhelmed. Right. It's like there's something missing. And what we started to notice in these ultra performers that we now refer to as the multipliers, is that they are doing a different type of thinking. It's like evolution. Their thinking has evolved. For almost all of them, it was subconscious.

They weren't even aware of it.

Not even aware of it. It wasn't something that someone taught them to do. They did it instinctively, you know, like instinctually. They figured out and most of them couldn't explain it. They couldn't explain it to me and they couldn't explain it to most people if they said, why are you, how are you so productive? Right? Like how does, you know, how do you become a billionaire in 10 years when like most people work for 40 years and, you know, they can barely retire? It's a different type of thinking and, One of the things, this is true in many areas of our life, the next level of results always requires the next level of thinking. So here's what it is. So Era 3 time management is multiplying. It's not efficiency, it's not prioritizing, it's multiplying. And it's all based on what we call the significance calculation. So it's really, it's not, it's adding on like Dr. Covey's work as an example. So he, you know, presents this two-dimensional figure like a square. Where the y-axis is importance and the x-axis is urgency. But what multipliers are doing is they're making a third calculation, which we call significance. So it's kind of like if you were doing algebra, it would be the z-axis. It would turn the square into a cube.

Three-dimensional.

Three-dimensional thinking, era three thinking or three-dimensional thinking. And so here's the difference. urgency is how soon does this matter? Most of us live in a world of urgency. It's all about what needs to be done right now. Importance is different. Importance is how much does this matter? But significance is even different still. Significance is how long is this going to matter? So how is, what is the impact of this activity in the future.

10 years out, 20 years out.

Even 10 days out, yeah. It is breaking free of the paradigm of one day and instead thinking about tomorrow and the next day and the significance calculation changes everything because this is how it's possible to multiply time. So I'll just tell you in one sentence. So if you say, Rory, How is it possible to multiply time? This is the answer. So you wanna write this part down. You don't wanna miss this. The way you multiply time is by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow. There's certain things you do right now that create more time in the future. That's the significance calculation. So when I say multiply time, people often think I'm exaggerating or that it's like a marketing hyperbole, right? As I'm like, I'm sensationalizing a concept. When we say this, we're not exaggerating. We mean this literally. Now, it kind of fries your brain because you go, you,'ve been told your whole life, you can't, time is the one thing you can never get back. It's the one thing you can never get more of. And it is true that there's nothing that we can do, there's nothing I can do to give you more time inside of one day. So one day is finite and we're all limited by the same 24 hours, which by the way is 1440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. So I can't teach you to create more, I don't have control over time. Right? There's no such thing as time management. There's only self-management. But that's exactly the problem is most of us think about our activities in the paradigm of one day. We wake up and we say, what's the most important thing I can do today? And it's not that that's a bad question. It's just not the question that multipliers ask. Multipliers don't say, what is the most important thing I can do today? Multipliers ask, what are the things I can do today that create more time tomorrow? What are the things I can do now that make the future better? you're literally breaking free of the urgency paradigm of just what matters right here, right now, and you're introducing the significance paradigm of what is going to have impact over the long haul. Right.

How do you know which actions to focus on urgently that will have impact over the long haul? When you've got everything significant.

Yes. Well, there's a tool called the focus funnel. that we developed here to help people apply this. So there's only one big idea in this whole conversation, which is spend time on things today that give you more time tomorrow. That's how you multiply time. And then you go, how do I do that? And there's five core methods, strategies. We call them permissions because there's an emotional side. What we've also learned is that most people treat time management logically, but it's actually an emotional conversation. For most of us, it's not just our calendar and our inbox and our to-do list. It is our underlying feelings of guilt and fear and anxiety and worry, as well as ambition and our drive to be successful and feel valued and important and to make impact in the world. these underlying emotional drivers dictate as much as dictate how we spend our time and the choices that we make as much as anything on our to-do list.

What do we feel most guilty about? We feel most guilty about not doing something that we want to do, about delaying something, about wasting our time.

I would say that guilt. So guilt corresponds with the first of the five permissions, which is eliminate. So if you were to picture a funnel, okay, so if I was going to draw this out, right, like you think of all of the stuff there is to do comes into the top. And then the focus funnel is our attempt to create a visual illustration that codifies the thought process that multipliers go through intuitively in their own brain so that the rest of us can kind of like see it and follow it. So the very first question is, can this be eliminated?

So give me an example of your life or someone's business or career or whatever it might be.

There's tons of things. I mean, in your personal life, I mean, I used, I like the example of TV because it's hilarious how people will, in the same dinner conversation, talk about how they're so busy and married and overwhelmed and then talk about the three series on Netflix that they have binged in like the last month. Right.

Which took 20 hours of their life.

Yeah, and so it's like, okay, I'm not saying you shouldn't watch TV. By the way, I'm not telling you anything you shouldn't or shouldn't do.

I'm just introducing the framework for you to decide how to spend your time. But if you're saying you're too busy and overwhelmed, check to where you're spending your time the most. That's right. And Nielsen says- Nielsen says- if it's six hours on Instagram a day and you're not being, you're not creating something.

Of significance and you're just browsing, or if you're 20 hours a week on TV and you're, I'm overwhelmed and tired and exhausted, then just look at where you're spending your time. Yeah, and Nielsen ratings, this is from a few years ago, but they said the average American watches 27 hours a week of television.

A week?

A week. It's a part-time job. So.

27 hours a week. How much is that a day?

I mean, so seven times, it's like four hours a day.

Four hours a day of TV?

It's like four hours a day. That's a ton.

That's a lot of time.

I mean, you could build a big side hustle in a couple hours every day.

Even if you just cut half of that down. and you watch two hours a day of TV and you spend two hours on your side hustle or something else, your health, your relationships, imagine the benefits you would have down the line.

So, yeah, there's anything eliminate is the first opportunity to multiply because anything I say no to today creates time in the future. How? It's preventing me from doing something that I would have otherwise been doing had I not given myself the permission to eliminate, like had I not said no. So basically this is saying no and people really struggle with saying no. In businesses, this happens all the time. People have all these, so at Brand Builders Group, we do personal brand strategy, right? So we're coaching all these like people on building and monetizing their personal brand. Well, they have like 100 business models. It's like, oh, I want to have a video course and a membership site and a live event and consulting. I want to do keynote speaking and and I want to get a book deal and, you know, and sponsorships and brand deals. And it's like when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. So you have to, by saying no to some things, you power your ability to focus on the few significant things that will multiply time. So you have to say no, but this is something that people struggle with. Yeah. I struggle with it.

You know, 'cause there's, well, especially when you get to a certain level of success where there's a lot of opportunities and cool things and exciting things and new shiny objects, we wanna do lots of things. High achievers, people that have gotten out of the weeds of their life and they have different problems which are opportunity problems. Again, first world problems. It's how do you focus your time and energy and making the decisions that you wanna focus on now for your future and that is a challenge in just making decisions. Decision fatigue is a thing for people and learning how to place importance on the things that you want to spend your time on is going to be key for you.

Totally and a lot of people, the decision fatigue, what happens is they, it does wear on you and so a lot of people don't make conscious decisions. So what happens is...

They make what?

Emotional decisions, reaction decisions.

Yes, their unconscious emotional impulses, right? And if you're not consciously saying no to the things that don't matter, you end up unconsciously saying no to the things that do matter.

What if everything matters to you?

So, you know, that's what I said actually. So I, in, so we were, you know, this became the Procrastinate on Purpose book. So this was my second book. When we were profiling all these people, I was doing interviews and I told one of the multipliers, I said, I don't like this one. I got to where I am by being a yes man, by like doing a lot of things and doing them well and like saying yes to meetings and meeting people all the time. And they said, Rory, that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. And I was like, oh, okay. And here's what they said. They said, you,'re trying to go through life without saying no, which is admirable because you're a nice guy. But what you failed to realize is that you are always saying no to something. Anytime you say yes to one thing, you simultaneously are saying no to an infinite number of other things. So even when you think you're saying, yes, everything is important to me. No, nothing is important to you. Wow. Nothing is important enough for you to focus on. And you don't have a method for focus. And focus is power. So most of us are losing because we're wandering, we're meandering through a bunch of insignificant, trivial tasks feeling productive when really we're just diluted. Right. So, that's the first one, eliminate. Now, if you can't eliminate the task, then it drops down to the center of the focus funnel, which is automate, the permission to invest. And this is so powerful because anything you create a process for today saves you time in the future.

Yes.

Now, if I set up a process for it or a system or if I write code, there's a lot of automation like actual technologies and things that you can deploy. If I take the time to set it up today, then tomorrow the system or the process is doing the thing instead of me. Multiplying time. Now, here's the challenge is that most of us are aware that those tools exist. But if you ask someone, Louis, I mean, like if you ask the average business owner, you know, whatever, you know, achiever, you know, somebody pursuing greatness, are you aware of tools and systems and processes and technologies that you could implement or deploy or improve inside of your goals that would automate things. They would all say yes. But if you said, why haven't you done it yet? What do you think they'd say?

It takes too much time.

It takes too much time.

It's easier to do it myself right now just a couple minutes every day as opposed to-- Building the system. Figuring out the software, learning it, going through the training, hiring someone, teaching them all the time and energy. I might as well just do it myself right now.

Bingo. Yeah, so it's like, it's so ironic because the two excuses we would use for why we haven't automated things is we would say, either I don't have the time or I don't have the patience.

Patience?

Money. The money.

The patience.

The patience we'll talk about in a second.

We're going to talk about the time or the money.

I don't have the time or the money. And it's wild because those two excuses we would use for not automating something are exactly the opposite of how it is when you make the significance calculation.

'Cause if you did automate, you would save time or you would multiply time and you'd earn more money from your time doing something else.

Yeah, so an easy example is bill pay. You know, this is a quick example, right? So if you had two hours open in your day today and I said, Louis, you know, what's the most important thing you could do today? You'd have a list of things that you would do. And if I said, Hey, I think you should consider setting up online bill pay. For most of us, we would be like, no. Like, that is not important. That's not significant. that seems totally trivial. But if you look at this the way a multiplier would, you go, okay, if you spend two hours today setting up online bill pay, and it saves you 30 minutes every month from paying your bills in the future, then after four months time, you will have broken even, 30-30-30-30, you will have broken even on those initial two hours, And then every month thereafter, you'll get something that we call ROTI, Return On Time Invested. Because now the system is doing the thing that you would have otherwise been doing. Another way that we say this, I know this is one of your favorite Roryisms, is that automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money. Right. Automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money. Just like compounding interest takes money and it turns it into more money. Automation takes time and it turns it into more time. Just like nobody has extra money to invest. I mean, not nobody. There's some people are so rich, it's like that's all they do. But the average person doesn't have you know, an extra 10 grand just laying around to be like, yeah, I'm gonna invest it. Usually, you have to sacrifice something in the short term. You don't go on a trip, you don't buy the car, you don't buy the TV, and that is where you create the margin to reinvest into, you know, whatever the stock market, mutual funds, like real estate. Real estate, whatever you do. That is also how time is. Nobody has extra time to set up a system. You know, marketing automation is one of the big things we teach our clients. I know you guys do a lot of it here. We're experts in marketing automation. One of the reasons we became experts in it is we realized, oh my gosh, if I can build a funnel, which is just a sequence, a series of emails and automating trust basically, giving value to people, then that system basically becomes like an employee for me that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's always out there. But I don't have time to build it. And yet you only say that in the absence of significance. And that's what happens. In the absence of the significance calculation, we inadvertently overweight the urgency calculation and we doom ourselves to a lifetime sentence of always feeling busy because we're constantly making decisions only about what needs to get done today and never thinking ahead via the significance. calculation of tomorrow.

So how do we know what is most significant today?

Yeah, so that- Do we make a.

List of everything that's on our mind or on our to-do list? Do we step back and actually say, okay, where could I, do I analyze my time where I'm spending the most of my time every day, every week, every month and say, okay, where can I pull this back and what should I putting it towards? How do we figure out what is significant?

Yeah, so good question.

Now and next year.

So, significance in some ways is an internal assessment, right? But the word significant is a little bit tricky because it's got the double entendre of significant meaning like profound, but significant how I'm using it here is not-- Multiplying time. It's just literal. It's like, what's the impact? So, actually, I think a way to go to figure this out is to go, how do I figure out what's important? Because significance is a part of the importance calculation, as is urgency. I'm not telling you that you can, nor is it realistic, that you would never do things that are more urgent. But if there's no significance calculation, all you only ever do is what's urgent.

Yes.

You only fall victim to the fires.

And you feel always busy, overwhelmed, stressed, never having enough time.

Bingo. And that was me, right? And then we did a study and then it was like, oh my gosh, we need to write a book on this, which becomes the book, Procrastinate on Purpose, which then becomes a TED Talk. TED Talk goes viral and it's like, I don't even teach productivity. I teach influence. Brand Builders Group, we study the psychology of influence. Now I would say that self-management is influencing yourself. So this does fall in that category. As well as the other stuff we do around self-discipline is kind of influencing self. So before you can influence others, you should influence self so that it does fit the context. But anyways, I say that to say I never set out to write a book about this. It happened as a result of going, oh my gosh, I'm doing this wrong. So to your question, here's an exercise. Simple, you list everything out you have to do. And on one column, it is the urgency column, which is how soon does this need to be done? Rate it one to 10. The next column is the significance column, which is how much is the completion of this task going to matter in the future? If you were just doing it on time-based, you would say scale of one to 10, How much time will this task make me in the future? That's significance. So it's a nat, significance is a natural counterbalancing force to urgency. Then multiply the two numbers together, and that'll give you your importance score. Interesting. And then rearrange the activities in order of importance. So it's kind of, you know, it's building on what Dr. Covey was doing, right? He was teaching us, number one, not all tasks are created equal. Number two, you should score the tasks. And number three, you should focus first on what matters most, but what he didn't give us, which there wasn't as much of a need to in 1989. Right. I mean, in 1989-- We didn't have cell phones.

We didn't have technology. We didn't have internet.

Social media.

We didn't have social media. We didn't have these apps. We didn't have all these other tools that the world uses today.

And you didn't have the perpetual communication.

Constant messaging.

When you left work, You left work. You didn't have a way to talk to anybody.

And people had to call you on a landline, you pick it up off the wall, or you just didn't pick it up.

Yeah.

You weren't getting constantly messages vibrated in your thigh of like another distraction, opportunity, friend, whatever. Yeah, so press hit, you know, something.

And here's what I would say, right, is go, you can't solve today's time management challenges using yesterday's time management strategies. But most people are. For most people, importance and urgency, like Dr. Covey's thing, is the predominant method. I mean, it's probably the most stolen or like copyright abused technique that there is, and it doesn't make this new calculation of significance. So all you're doing is adding to it and you're breaking, sounds so cheesy to say a paradigm shift, but you're, you're shifting from a lens of what matters in the next 24 hours to what matters in the future. And it's multiplying. So automation is to your time, what compounding interest is to your money. And as you give yourself the permission to invest in building the system, it compounds over time. Now, if you can't automate it, Eliminate, automate. Then that task drops down to the bottom of the funnel, which is delegate. Delegate. Anytime you train somebody else to do something, then in the future, that person is doing it. So it's multiplying time. They're doing it instead of you. Again, it's the same short term problem. I don't have time. Like, so if I asked you, I said, Are there things you're doing, Louis, every day that you, somebody could, you could train somebody how to do for you? I know you're pretty good at this, but let's just say like the average entrepreneur, you know, or executive or even mom, like a mom, like a mom who works at home, there's a bunch of stuff that she's doing and, you know, it's, It's easier to put your three-year-old's shoes on for them than to stop and teach them and make them do it.

Right, right.

But if you teach them to do it, then now.

Every day for the next two years they're doing it.

Right, so, and I say that 'cause I have a four-year-old, AJ and I, we got a four-year-old and a two-year-old, so this is like real talk at the Vaden house right now. Now, your thinking is really good though, because you go, gosh, comments are important to me. So one of the things we've had a lot of our clients do with comments that have lots of followers is, We just write out a series of like the first four responses. And then if someone comments like more than five times, they move it over into the primary inbox so that like me as an example, I will personally reply. Now the first couple responses are standard, but I wrote them. They are what I would say if I were there right in that moment. So the fact that someone else is copying and pasting it, It's like it is what I would say you write out a decision tree of how the conversation is going to go. Now, if somebody makes it through that, I never want someone to pretend they are me.

Sure.

And I'm not trying to outsource my personality. But most people, it's like, Hey, how's this? Or they have a quick question and it's like, Great, we're responding faster than even if it was me. And it is the thing I would be doing anyways. So you can do both. When you think this way. Yes.

When you break the paradigm.

Yeah. And you're thinking long term. Now, so delegate the... That's the third step. Yeah. Do we have time for the 30x rule?

Yep. We got time.

So this is big because a lot of people struggle with going, it's just faster for me to do it myself.

And then teaching someone else on how to do this.

Then teaching someone else. And so there's a great rule that we discovered and then we included it, like we wrote it in the book called the Third 30x rule. And this is what it says. You should spend 30 times the amount of time it takes you to do a task once on training someone else to do a task for you. So let's just say there's a task that takes you five minutes every day. The 30x rule says that you should spend 30 times five, 30x, 30 times five, which is 150 minutes. It says you should be willing to spend 150 minutes training someone to do a task that only takes you five. Which is where some people, we do lose them because they go, Rory, that doesn't make any sense. Like why would I spend 150 minutes? That's like couple two and a half hours training someone to... I could just do it in five. And the answer is it never makes sense to trade 150 minutes for five Unless you make the significance calculation.

Yes.

Because you're not doing that task for five minutes. You're doing it five minutes a day, which means it's five minutes the next day, and the next day, and the next day. If you look at this calculation through just one year of significance, which is like 250 working days, it's really five times 250, which is 1,250 minutes. It's not a five-minute task. It's a 1,250-minute task every year. Right. So now the decision is different. The decision is not should I spend 150 minutes to save five, it's should I spend 150 to save 1,250. The answer is just as obvious as it was before, but it's the opposite decision that we would have originally made. And notice the task hasn't changed, the people haven't changed, only one thing has changed. that person's thinking. The only thing that has changed is their thinking. The next level of results always requires the next level of thinking. So when you make the significance calculation, it almost never makes sense for you to do that activity. It's never based on time alone. It's never faster for you to do it. It is faster to do it once Maybe twice. But again, if you look at significance calculation and you think longer term, eventually that person's gonna figure it out.

Well, here's what everyone will say. I already know what people are thinking. Well, no one can do this action as good as me. This is my skill. Or I've done this for years. I know the way I like it. I know the way I want it to be done. I've tried training someone in the past. It took me five hours. They still couldn't get it. It was only 70 or 80% as good as me. So I just took it back myself and was resentful of the whole process.

Happens all the time.

So how does someone get over the fact that no one can do it as good as them, potentially in the first six to 12 months?

Extend the horizon. It is frustrating, it is scary. Don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying it's easy. You usually have to go through a couple assistants before you find the right one. You spend a few minutes, but if you do a good job, your assistant that you hire higher, we'll create a training manual so that the next one picks up where that one left off.

And again, if you want to get to the next level in anything in your life, it's going to require a new level of thinking and a new level of evolving internally.

Yes.

You're going to need to develop a growth mindset. You're going to need to overcome resentments and grudges and frustrations. You're going to have to learn the uncomfortable things that keep you stuck in that place from saying, I'm just gonna do this myself. You gotta start to really evolve as a human in order to get to this next level.

Yeah. And I would say it's personal development, right? It's plugging into this show. It's reading the Procrastination on Purpose book. Go get it. It's freaking awesome. It's joining coaching groups and surrounding your, it's like getting accountability. And then it is being a, surrounding yourself with like-minded people is a huge part of this.

Yes.

What we're talking about on this episode, like, this is not for the masses.

Not easy.

Like, very few people will ever even entertain. This is pretty high level stuff we're dealing with here. So you've got to. You got to find a community of people that you can be around on a regular basis who are gonna hold you accountable and push you to go, no, no, no, no. You have to delegate because, you know, to what you said about growth. Is the reason delegate is hard is because for most of us we became leaders by being achievers, by being great, right? Like you got here by being a perfectionist and by doing everything with speed and efficiency.

And pulling all-nighters and... Yeah, whatever it takes.

But what got you here as a performer won't get you there as a leader.

That's true.

If you don't learn to do this, you are giving yourself a lifetime sentence of having to do it all yourself. And one of my other favorite things that came out of one of these interviews was one of the multipliers said, 80% done right by someone else is always better than 100% done right by me. So this is why we call this one the permission of imperfect. Because you have to give yourself the permission of short-term imperfection, which is very hard for chronic overachievers who have been demanded perfection for themselves, which is one reason why sometimes great performers don't make great leaders is because they assume everyone else will be like them and they'll get it the first try and they don't have grace and compassion for Most of humanity are average students. It takes a minute to learn and that doesn't mean they're stupid. It's like it takes a minute and you have to give yourself and them flexibility, some time, some grace, some space to go, yeah, mess it up. It's all right. We'll fix it. You'll figure it out and then you'll learn it and then you'll master it and then you'll teach and then one day you'll teach it to somebody. Andy Stanley has a great, do you know Andy Stanley? No. Oh man, he is one of the best communicators in the world. he's actually a pastor of a church. But anyways, he does all this leadership stuff and he has this one quote that I love. He says, leadership, you have to remember, leadership is not about getting things done right. Leadership's about getting things done through other people. And people are imperfect. We're all imperfect. The art is not, how do I just get perfect stuff? How do I work through imperfect people like me through imperfect processes to create something beautiful that the world can benefit from? That I didn't have to do all of the work on myself.

I didn't have to spend all my time making it solo. That's right. Because you can't scale your impact.

If you have to do everything yourself, you're not going to scale your impact. Right. So we got eliminate, automate, delegate.

Yeah, okay.

So now we're at the bottom. So if you can't eliminate it, automate it, or delegate it, then that task falls out the bottom of the focus funnel. and there is one key remaining question, which is, must this task be done now or can it wait until later? So if the task must be done now, that is how you know it's significant. You know it's a thing that multiplies your time, it must be done, it must be done by you, and it must be done right now. We call that the permission to protect, which is basically where you you know, you focus in on that thing. In fact, my first book, Take the Stairs, really was more about that. So Procrastinate on Purpose, funny enough, isn't actually a sequel to Take the Stairs. It's more of a prequel. So it's like how to identify what to do and then take the stairs as how to get yourself to do the thing you don't feel like doing, which is where the Take the Stairs metaphor comes from. So that's concentrate. And there's a lot that's been written on it. I know you've had Cal Newport on. You know, he's got good stuff like deep work, Greg McHugh and stuff on essentialism or I think you've had one thing. The one thing. All of those to me really center in around like, okay, now go after it. But to me, what there's been less written on is the other way is you go, okay, if the task must be done and it must be done by you, but then you say, must it be done right now? and the answer is no, then it goes out the other side of the focus funnel. And that is where we're encouraging you not to eliminate, automate, delegate or concentrate, but to procrastinate on purpose, which is where the title of the book came from.

So give me an example of something that you've been procrastinating on purpose in the last year or a couple of years.

Okay, so cleaning out my inbox is a great example. So we're in, we're in the startup mode right now. So Bramble is, I mean, we're getting out of, we're getting out of that mode. We're like three years in. But we also have four-year-old, I mean, the last four years, it's like we had a baby, sold a company, started a new company, had another baby.

Moved into a new house.

COVID hit, moved into a house. So it was like, yeah, I'm not gonna try to have a zero inbox at this particular moment, like this season of my life. And that's permission. That's the emotional side is people-- To.

Allowing you to say, this isn't done right now. this is messy.

It's messy.

I know I want to get it done, but I'm not gonna put. It's not the most significant thing right now for me to do this. I've got to be a dad. I gotta be. I'm gonna take care of kids. We gotta earn money. We gotta do these things. The inbox is not the most important thing, even though it might be a pattern of the past that we all have done. It's there. Let me just do this for 20 minutes, and then that 20 minutes every day. is not used for something significant. Just like replying to comments on social media or watching Netflix or whatever it is, procrastinate that thing and wait till later.

Yes, yeah, we call it pop, procrastinate on purpose. So you pop it back to the top of the focus funnel.

Can I eliminate it? Is there a way to automate it?

Yeah, so it goes into that holding pattern.

Exactly. And that's the process.

Yeah, so that's the whole process and it's meant to be simple because it's meant to be dynamic and fluid. And at the end of the day, all that really matters here is that you're spending time on things today that give you more time tomorrow. And then the last thing I would say on this, Louis, is this is important is once you have identified your next most significant priority, until you accomplish that thing, everything else is a distraction.

So if I have a messy room, I shouldn't go clean my room first and then get to my homework.

It depends. It's all relative to the other stuff. I can't, I'm not gonna say that. It's all relative. It's relative. So that's why it's like, I can't tell you what to do in your life. All I can offer you is here is a system of thinking that these people do. And I do wanna, I wanna edify like, this takes time. You have to keep learning this. You have to stay plugged into people who are thinking like this. You got to join groups and be a part of communities where you're surrounded by people who think like this.

Yeah, and this is the key, this is the habits of high performers in having a productive life, business, and everything. And what you just said right there is it's hard to do anything on your own. It's hard to apply this. It's hard to learn a new skill on your own. It's hard to delegate on your own. you've got to consistently be willing to invest in learning, invest in education, and invest in accountability. For me, I have so many accountability partners in my life that I pay for, that I invest in. Business, health, relationships, therapy, everything. I'm constantly investing in it because there's only so much discipline and motivation I have on my own. I can be one of the hardest workers in the gym one time, maybe five times in a week. But there's gonna be that one day that I'm like, I'd rather just sleep in today. But if I know I'm invested and accountable to a coach that I've paid for and they're gonna be there and show up for me, I'm gonna give a little bit more and I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna be more consistent. This is why we have greatness coaching. And I wanted to let people know they can apply for that. Lewis.house.com coaching. If you haven't applied yet, make sure to do it. This is people that are high achievers, that want to have accountability and a group every month to be supported by with a coach to help you follow through on things like this in your business and in your life. So if you guys haven't applied yet, go to lewishouse.com/coaching and apply for that so you can learn more about greatness coaching. It's a year of accountability and coaching with a lot of other good stuff included in there. If you want to learn more about the focus funnel and really how to be more productive and multiply your time, make sure you guys get this book. Game Changer book, Procrastinate on Purpose: Five Permissions to Multiply youy Time by my friend, Rory Vaden. We're doing a series with Rory about a few different things right now, and personal branding and motivation and some other things, confidence as well. So make sure you subscribe. Follow Rory on social media, Rory Vaden everywhere. Check out Brand Builders Group. If you want to learn more about that as well. and get the book if you want to learn how to multiply time and give this to a friend as well. Rory, it's been amazing, man. I'm excited for this series with you.

Yeah.

And we'll talk to you soon. Love you, brother.

Appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, please share this with a few friends that you think would be inspired by this as well. Just text a few friends, post it on social media. Make sure to tag me and Rory Vaden as well. LewisHowes.com/1133 for the full show notes and more information back there, or you can just copy and paste this wherever you're listening to this podcast. Also, make sure to subscribe to the School of Greatness over on Apple Podcast and leave us a review sharing us the part that you enjoyed the most about this episode. We're always loving to hear the feedback and the reviews from people. So click the Subscribe button on Apple Podcast or Spotify, leave us a review and let us know what you think. And make sure to go sign up and apply over@lewis-howes.com/coaching. If you want to learn about how to be in the next group of Greatness Coaching, to really have the accountability and the coaching you need to achieve incredible business results, launch your dreams and improve your life. Make sure to check it out, lewishouse.com/coaching to see if you're the right fit. And I want to leave you with a quote from Stephen Covey who said, the key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. Ooh, this is a big one. There's so many distractions out there in the world and I hope this episode gave you some clarity and some strategies and tools to max and optimize your income and your time. If you enjoyed this, again, please let me know over on social media. And if no one has told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.