The Myth Of Work-Life Balance? With Ryan Deiss

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You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to Business Lunch. This is Darren Clark, the producer of the show. And today we're sharing an episode with Ryan Deiss, who's talking with Justin Rondo. Now, we've heard from Ryan before and we're going to be hearing a lot more from him on this show, which is exciting. But if you're an entrepreneur or even just an adult, this episode is going to help you. And when it does, please do share it on socials and hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening. All right, let's get stuck in.

All right, so why the heck are we here? What are we talking about? How are we going to help people?

All right, so today I think you get this question a lot. Not as much me, because I don't think people think I can balance a darn thing, but you definitely get this question a lot. Running 40 plus companies and having a family of four and like, really, they have this belief that there is this almost unicorn concept of balance, healthy balance, perfect balance.

Right?

So I really kind of want to talk about that today because I think you have a really cool understanding of that and practice of that as well and have some good things that you could share about this kind of concept of balance.

Just to be clear, I don't actually run 40 different companies. We've got, you know, good, talented people running stuff. But it is busy. I mean, in this world, if you're an adult, you generally live two lives. You know, you have a work life and you have your personal life. And then we're all told that we need to have this work life balance. And I can tell you this is something that I've worked on and worked on for literally years. I mean, I've got four kids and I started really actively thinking about this and studying this when my wife got pregnant with kid number one. So for over a decade. And I've never been able to make it work. And I think part of the reason lies in the word itself, because the concept of balance, if we think about balance, what's the picture that creates in your head? Right? Something balancing, teetering there in this perfect motionless state. And that's never been my experience. And I've never found that I could control any aspect of my life, whether it be work or family. I don't have enough control and autonomy over this stuff at work. I mean, you know, you're here, there's a fire that's going to flare up every single day. And I Love reading these books where they're like, oh, map out every day based on minutes. You can do that because you write books about doing that. I don't know a single person and I've had very honest conversations with lots of people. I don't know a single person that can really pull that off for any extended period of time. Because stuff happens, you got to deal with it. If you're an owner executive, if you're a valuable person, you're in demand. Also, if you have kids, family or in a committed relationship, there's going to be demands there. My oldest daughter for almost a year woke up at least three or four days out of the week screaming and crying because she kept having this recurring nightmare about the Cookie Monster. Right? Now how do you plan for that?

Right?

That's not covered in some book. So my feeling on balance is really, you can't. And so what I've done is I've more adopted a mindset of prioritize and accept that some balls are going to get dropped, be okay with that. And I don't know, maybe I'm not the most Zen like person in the world, but I think being okay with the fact that it's not all going to get done. Because if you are a valuable human being, there will always be more demand for your time than you have time to give. So I think that's kind of the first big thing. It really starts with prioritization and the simultaneous acceptance that you can't get it all done. If you merely prioritize, then you're one of these poor people that has this to do list that it grows faster, you can check stuff off and that's a recipe for insanity as well.

One thing that you said there that I think would be interesting to kind of expand on, if you're prioritizing something or wanting to balance something out, you're doing that for your own sanity at some point. But then a lot of the reason people try to have work life balances or friend professional balances and those types of things is, is not just for their sanity, but it's coming down to the perception from other people. Really it comes down to there's two levels when you're trying to balance things. It's for your own sanity versus letting people know where they stand, whether that be your employees or your spouse or your kids. So I think that that's something worth diving into because there's kind of the two tier structure there. Because I think if you're saying balls are gonna get dropped, which ones can and then how does that happen?

So I think that's where prioritization has to begin. Right? So prioritization is fractal. So there's prioritization at a macro level. So at the highest level, you have, obviously, faith, family, friends, vocation, health, these kind of big areas that different people are gonna prioritize. Now, I think you've gotta ask yourself, what's the season of life that we're in? So for me right now, and I'm not gonna really necessarily speak to the faith aspect. Cause, you know, that can get a little bit dicey. Dicey. See what he did there? But when you get to family, though, right now, the season life that I'm in, it's really all about my kids, but it's also about my wife. So my marriage is the most important thing to me because if that's off, then everything else I know is going to get jacked up. So I say to my kids, I love you. I love your mom more. That's why it's critical for us to go on date nights and take trips, just the two of us, because I don't want the kids to define that. But then the kids, they're right there, and so making sure that I make time for that. So that's number one for me right now. Now, in 20 years, that'll be different, right? Because my kids will have grown. And now maybe there's grandkids coming around at that point, maybe not. But for this season, that family, that's priority, you know, number one. And then you have work. I mean, we're doing a lot of building here. Not just a digital marketer, but a lot of our other companies. Now, there may come a time where there's some exits and I'm no longer as needed. Maybe I shift from an active role to more of a board position, and that can shift into a third or fourth position. But for right now, yeah, that's second. And so then when you get into friends, I tell my friends all the time, love you, Mean it. I'll see you in 10 years. You know, my best friend in the world. Been best friends since third grade. We barely see each other and we live in the same neighborhood, but we both understand and have that conversation. It's not that I don't care about you. In this season of life, it's going to be really, really, really hard. So you have to carve out time, but it's not going to be like it was when we were college roommates kind of thing. So I think getting clear on that and being okay with it. The first six months of this year were super, unbelievably, astoundingly hectic. More hectic than they've ever been with work. So what suffered? My health. I didn't go to the gym, I didn't work out. I didn't take time for that because I couldn't do that and be in there in the mornings with my kids. So that's where. As long as you're intentional about it, I think that's the big thing. If you're intentional about it and it's your call, then you don't have as much guilt. I mean, maybe you still feel guilty, but you're like, that's just frickin reality. I can't do it. So I think from a macro perspective, you've got to decide what's the season that you're in. And if you're single, no kids, then you don't need to prioritize and spend as much time with family. You gotta call mom every now and then kind of thing, right?

Yeah, she reminds me on Facebook.

Exactly. I'll tell you, if you're young, if you're in your 20s and you're not married, you don't have kids. I got married at 23 and had a kid at 25. So we were really, really, really young when we went through this. But if you're in your 20s and that's not your reality, gosh, you can use this as an opportunity to really double down on work and use it as massive growth and massive learning because it's going to get harder. So I think that's kind of the first area where it has to begin prioritizing at that macro level. And then what does that look like? Right, because you could say, oh, you're a priority. But people show priorities and they show commitments. Something we talk about here at Digital Marketer in two ways, right? Your wallet, your calendar. So I literally sit down with my wife twice a year at the end of the year and then again in the middle of the year. And I say block them out. Block out when you want us to go on trips and when you want to go on family vacations. So block them out. So I can say that my family gets first dibs because they do over my calendar. And when that's blocked out, that's blocked out, I'm gonna be gone. Then they get that time first and then the work and everything else has to fill in around it.

Yeah, that was actually, I was gonna ask you to get in some specifics. There with you saying that, you know, family comes first in general. So how does that impact your business schedules and those types of things? But one thing I think is also worth talking about is during the day people have this idea that they can have this hard cutoff, then go from work straight to kind of like family mode. Is that realistic? Kind of like, what's the kind of average day kind of setup for somebody? I guess you can't really say average day because like you were saying, you have to put things in context and kind of know what season you're in. But for the season that you're in right now, what's kind of like the day like, and does a hard cutoff really exist? Can you leave the office at 5, 6 o' clock and just be like, done?

I mean, if there's something coming up where, you know, I know that I need to cut out because I need to get to one of my kids games or a dance recital, then yes I can. Because if I don't, I'm dead. Right? I mean, so that's these things, like people say like, oh, I can't do it, like, but people will leave and cut work at a particular time because they have a dentist appointment. But people do that because they recognize that that's critical. So can you cut it off? Yeah. But to say that every single day I'm going to keep this really tight schedule, for me at least that's not realistic. I generally work kind of 9 to 5 and sometimes I'll get up a little bit earlier and sometimes I'll work a little bit longer. Sometimes I'll have to work late. But I really try to leave every day no later than six. I try to not take my computer home again. These are all tangible, visible things where I know if I'm leaving past six, then I'm not prioritizing family. If I'm taking my computer home, then I know that I'm going to be working from home. For me, here's the best that I can really accomplish. I pick one thing, one thing that I'm gonna try to get done on a given day. And I try to schedule one hour, one thing and one hour. And I make sure the one thing is big enough that if that's all that I get done, great. And I make sure that that hour is enough for me to make significant progress towards that one thing. Maybe not get it done, but make significant progress. But here's what I found. I found that one hour can bleed into 2 and 3 and 4 and 5, right? That time Tends to expand, except when it doesn't. Right. So that's what I say, like prioritizing. So I'm going to prioritize family, and then I'm also going to want to prioritize within each of those areas. So I want to prioritize from a work perspective. So for me, what that looks like is I got to pick one thing, I'll have a couple of secondary things. If I get to them, great. And as far as that one thing is concerned, if I don't totally get it done, then I'm okay with that. Like I said, prioritize. But accept the fact that some balls are going to get dropped, that some things are going to slip through the cracks, and that's okay. But my goal, my goal, one thing, one focused hour. And if I can get that in, it's a good day. So I'm leaving an enormous amount of time to allow kind of life to happen to me. But that's because it's just the season that we're in.

Like I said, fires come up all the time. You put your to do list up there and that thing might not move if you're being unrealistic about kind of what you can get done in that day. And I think you've said plenty of times that just in a general month, people always think they can get way more done during that period of time than they actually can. And I think that goes down to even the day level. Like, I'll come in and put my check sheet up there and I'm kind of learning about the different things that pop up. Going from a remote employee that really didn't have anybody reporting to him to somebody that's kind of moving up into a different role. And like, oh my gosh, like, there's all these things that I have to deal with now. So how I used to approach things as somebody who's like a high capacity doer changes to, oh, gosh, like, maybe I can't knock those things out anymore. And so I think, yeah, if you can kind of focus on that one thing, like you're saying, like, if I can get that one hour to that one thing, that leaves for all sorts of fires to kind of flare up.

Yeah. And if it doesn't happen, right. If a fire doesn't flare up, then that's when one hour can turn into two and turn in three. And for me, that's how I work. If I get in, I get some momentum, I can keep going. And that might be the time when I call home and I Say, hey sweetie, I'm going to be late working tonight because I'm in the zone, I'm in the groove. She's like, I get it. The key is you can't make that the norm. Are these times when balls do get dropped, when things don't work out, is it the exception or is it the rule? And when it becomes the rule, and that's where you have to be concerned. But I think one of the ways that a lot of people set themselves up for failure is when they over schedule, when they over commit themselves. Because I'm telling you, it's really, really simple. When you're first getting started, when you're fresh out of college, when you're new at a job, it can be very easy to schedule every aspect of your day because you're just frankly not in that much demand. But as you ascend, as the company that you're at grow, as your families grow, growth creates demand. And with that, increased demand is going to mean that you don't just get to plan every little thing out. I mean, I love that expression, if you want to make God laugh, show him your plan. Right. So I found that if I just say, okay, if I only get this one thing done, will I be happy with the day? If I can say that going into the day and I know I can make significant progress, so not even necessarily done, if I can make significant progress on this one thing, will it be a good day? Yep. So I need one really great hour to feel good about the day. Now that forces me to make sure that the one thing that I'm working on is a pretty high leverage, pretty high value thing. I'm not going to spend that hour playing business. I'm going to spend that hour like organizing my file drawer and thing is that our moves maybe depending on what's coming up that day, I know that I'm not gonna be able to get that hour in during the 9 to 5. So I need to wake up at 5 o' clock in the morning to get that hour in. Maybe I can schedule it generally during the day. I found that really for me, from like 10 to 11 is a really good time for me. I don't know why it just kind of works out. Everybody's in, they're working.

Is that a time from productivity side or do you think it's a time just for scheduling? Cause I think there's two things to unpack there. One being the scheduling side, but also where your optimal groove center is.

Yeah, definitely. I mean from a scheduling, if I'M gonna schedule something, I'm gonna actually block that in because I don't. It's not that I don't believe in time blocking. I just think people overdo it. They overdo it and then when they fail they're like, okay. And they'll throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think if you're gonna time block, you know, you time block an hour or two. I don't like meetings in the morning because then they tend to stretch. And now you're playing business again. From a productivity standpoint, I'm most productive when I wake up early and just go. But for me, see, that doesn't work because my kids wake up early too. Just wake up at 6 o' clock in the morning, that's fine. My kids are up at 6:30, right? Oh, then wake up at 5:00 clock in the morning, that's fine. But my kids go to bed at 8:39 and I'd like to be able to spend some time on the couch just hanging out and chatting with my wife or just watching a TV show. So that's the thing where I know it's not all going to get done and I'm okay with that. But if I can prioritize and if I allow those priorities to manifest themselves in my calendar in particular, and then just accept the fact that some of the balls are going to get dropped, then it tends to work out.

Probably the hardest thing to be okay with is to say that, you know what, these things just aren't going to get done. I think everybody wants to be a completionist, quite frankly. Like there's something called tomorrow. Yeah. For anybody thinking about how they prioritize anything or like how they're scheduling out their day and how they're balancing work to family, are you consistently staying at work till 8 o' clock every day? Is that becoming the norm? And that's becoming the norm. You're out of balance.

That's the original thing about balance. I would set aside that visual completely. It's not about balance. Balance assumes that you're maintaining a state, the same state for an extended period of time. That's not how work and life goes together. You're going to sprint in one area, stop and sprint in another area. Balance assumes that we're always effectively multitasking everything at any given time. I could just pick up wherever I'm going because I'm always in this singular, focused, stationary, balanced position. I mean, I think that's the thing, like when you think about balance, it's stationary and that's just not how life works. And balance also assumes that there's some aspect of equality. That's the whole notion of equilibrium. No, go ahead and set all those ideas aside. Forget balance. Accept and adopt prioritization and then say based on the season of life that I'm in and what my values are, the things that really, really matter to me, then this is what I'm going to prioritize. Because at the end of the day, I'm one human being with the same 24 hours as everybody else. And the more in demand you are, the less you're going to be able to check all those boxes off. So in box zero, probably not going to be your reality. If you're an in demand person having pure time blocking, where you have every minute of every day scheduled out far in advance and you're able to maintain this flow, probably not going to happen if you're an in demand person operating in a rapid growth mode. So set that aside. If that's your standards, you're going to fail and you're going to be really.

Really upset if you're breaking down kind of like, forget balance, go into more of prioritization. If you look at your calendar, you first overlay it with your values. What are your top tier things? Is it family, work, et cetera, friends work based on who you are? So that's gonna be very individualistic. Then from values, you overlay the season on top of it, where you are at that current point of whether it be of that point in your life, that time of the year, that anything. And that's going to dictate how then you're able to schedule things out and prioritize what you'll get done.

The calendar is where you get to decide. That's where the rubber meets the road.

Yep.

I do believe absolutely in scheduling things. I'm not suggesting by any stretch of imagination that you just show up every day and let life happen to you. I'm just suggesting that you don't over schedule things because you're gonna find that you don't get done. You're gonna be disappointed if you make sure that this is the big thing that needs to get done today. That's where I'm gonna focus. But you leave yourself that time to where if you can just run with it. Most days I'm able to work effectively for far more than that one hour. But if I don't schedule in that one hour, I'll never actually get started. I'll let life happen. That's kind of how I balance everything. And it looks about as messy as it sounds. So we're going to start with what are the things that I value out of these different areas of life that we're all trying to balance simultaneously, which is freaking impossible. But if you're looking at your family or your vocation and your health and your friends and all that stuff, there's got to be some prioritization there. So right now, for me, I obviously, it's my family first, work second, my health third, friends fourth. Right. And I can look at my best friend in the eye and say that. So that's where it starts. That's kind of step one. So I've got that general framework now. If that's what I believe, then I need to start with family and I need to go to my wife and I need to say, okay, let's sit down. So in December, that's when we sit down at the end of every year and we plan out all of the next year. Right. When do you want to take vacations? How many family vacations are we going to take? So we have that discussion and it gets put in. We don't even know where we're going yet. It just gets put in. When are we going to take trips? How many trips are we going to take? These are all things that are good topics of conversations. What are the areas where we know, when are the dance recitals generally? Let's get that put in the calendar. So in December, family, if I'm going to say it's priority number one, then I got to give it first dibs on the calendar. So that's that next step. We then go in over the summer and we'll reevaluate. I mean, we're always reevaluating, but we'll have another kind of like, sit down in July and say, okay, is the second half of the year looking like we thought? Are we going to take another trip? Those kind of things. So now I've got my days. I know when I'm in the office and when I'm not. So I just make sure that every morning before I wake up, and ideally I do this the night before, but I'd be lying if I said that I do this every night before I leave, before I go into the office, I say, okay, what's the one critical important thing? That if I were to focus on this one thing today and I were to make significant progress on this one thing, that I could feel really, really good about the day, and what's one hour that I can Block out. So from a productivity standpoint, one thing, one hour. For me, usually the best time of the day is, funny enough, 10 to 11 mornings. I'm really, really productive. But my kids are awake and wanting food. So the mornings can be difficult. But that's more family time. That's fine. Again, I accept that. But I found that if I get in, I drill into that one hour, and life doesn't happen. Fires don't flare up. If this doesn't happen, then that one hour, I look up and I've been working for a couple hours, and now it's lunch. And maybe I do a working lunch and knock it out. But so for me, that's my process, and that's how I make sure that all these things get balanced. And as long as the priorities are aligned with my values, then I don't feel guilty. The balls that get dropped, the most important ones don't get dropped. There's obviously stuff that's going to come up during the year. We got Traffic and Conversion Summit coming up during that week. That gets blocked in there, too. And it's like, hey, kids, you're not going to see Daddy this week, right? I got to travel. And they. They get it right. They understand that. My wife understands that. So it's about setting those expectations on the front end with everyone that's really close to you.

If you do prioritization correctly, then. Then the balls that do get dropped are ones that aren't going to make you feel guilty or hopefully, on that perception side, make people think that they don't matter, whether that be family, friends, employees, subordinates, those types of things.

And what's amazing is I learned this from actually our cfo, Tom Litchfield. Tom, on his whiteboard has this kind of running list that he calls Squiggly Things Under Rocks. And he just keeps this list of things that he knows he has to go back and address. So to me, if certain things aren't getting done, I'll add them. I keep a list in Evernote called Squiggly Things Under Rocks in honor of Tom. I can't tell you, I'll go back and look at that pretty regularly. How often I'm just like, oh, that doesn't even need to get done anymore. So when we create these gigantic to do lists, we give us pressure. That stuff has to get done when oftentimes the amazing thing is a ball gets dropped. Nobody noticed. The world kept spinning and. And it turned out like, oh, I'm glad I didn't do that, because now we don't need it at all.

Yeah.

You just can't let the biggies drop.

That goes down to, like, even ideation and creation of tasks and those types of things. I think in the moment when we think of something, we're like, oh, my God, this is the greatest thing ever needs to get done right now. Let's just go, go, go, go, go. And then, because either you're the one that came up with the idea and the proximity to it being created, you haven't had a chance to have any sort of discourse to see if that's actually the thing that you need to. There's no scrutiny at that point in time.

Yeah. Get some distance away from it and you realize, like, maybe that wasn't that smart. It's like you wake up. You ever woken up in the middle of night, like, after having a dream and you felt like that was like the coolest thing? And then you go and try to tell a friend later on, like, this is stupid. That's kind of how some of our ideas and some of our to dos are. So I've benefited mightily from allowing balls to drop, from allowing plates to stop spinning and ultimately crash and realize, oh, everything is still here.

All right, great, Ryan. So, I mean, what would you say are like, kind of the final action items for people who are trying to find that quote unquote balance that, as you say, can't exist?

Step number one is go ahead and prioritize that list, right? Like friends, your work, health, family. I almost forgot. Family. Yeah, that's the top of my list. Yeah. Sorry. Wow, that was maybe some insight there. Yeah. But taking that basic list, right? Your family, your friends, your work and your health and prioritize that. And I've heard lots of people say, well, health has to be number one, because if my health starts to slip, then nothing else matters. That's true to an extent. I mean, come on, we live in a.

You know, were they ever in college?

Exactly. You know, I lived off of ramen noodles and cereal for four years of my life, so it's amazing what the body can endure for a season. Again, we're trying to avoid the binary. It's not all or nothing. It's about prioritizing. If waking up for me, if being there to be with my kids during breakfast means that I don't get to go to the gym first thing, then that's okay. I'll need to find other time or that's a ball that will drop. So step one, prioritize based on your values and then check it based on the season, like the season of life that you're in, then go in and depending on whatever was at the top, give that first dibs on your calendar and begin blocking out chunks for when big things are going to get done. So like I said, for me it's my family comes first. So my wife and I sit down and we block it out. If for you it's work, then I think asking yourself, what are the things that I can really work on? What are the big aspects if I want to make myself available that I can do and begin blocking those things out? There are some conferences that I want to make sure that I can attend. I may need to change my geography for a time period and go over here and do some networking, that kind of thing. But block that in. If that really is a priority, let it show there. On your calendar. You don't need details, right? You just need to block out the time so that when you look at your year from a 30,000 foot perspective, you can see I'm accounting for the fact that this is my top priority on my calendar. I should be visible for anyone to see. Then we gotta go narrow. So we went macro. Like I said, prioritization is fractal. So now we're gonna drill down to the day level, asking yourself, where's the ramp? Give me the ramp. One thing, one hour. What's the one big thing that I'm gonna work on tomorrow and what's one hour? That's the model that's worked best for me. Schedule the hour in. Because no matter how busy you are, you should be able to schedule in a frickin hour. Even if you just say I'm gonna do a working lunch or I'm gonna stay an hour over or I'm gonna wake up an hour earlier. You can get one hour. I don't care how freaking busy you are, you can get one hour and then pick what's something that if all I do is work on this one thing during this one hour, then I'm going to feel good about the day. If you can do that every single day and not let that streak finish, it's going to build, it's going to grow, you're going to make significant progress and you're going to find that one hour grows into 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6. Before you know it, you're checking a lot of boxes off of that to do list. Except for the ones that you don't. And that's okay too.

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