Using the Impact-Genius Matrix for Time Management with Ryan Deiss

So when I went back and looked, I found the answer was about 20 hours a week. Like 20 hours a week.

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to business launch podcast. It's wonderful to see everybody here. We can't actually see you, but I can see Ryan. So I guess that's kind of like partial seeing here.

Arguably better. Yeah. So I just got back. Wife and I spent a couple of days in Sedona hiking, and so that was nice just to get away. Maybe there's something we can talk about later. I'm just trying to get way more intentional about how much time I spend actually working, because I realize there's a massive diminishing return after I work a certain amount of time. It just like any productivity sort of falls off a cliff. And so really trying to. I did a lot of thinking about that, and so that that's what I've been up to. I also saw George Strait and Willie Nelson live in concert.

I heard. You know who told me that I had to learn this from Russ?

From our mutual driver friend. Yes.

Nice. How was Willie? Willie's like 91, right?

He literally was his 89th birthday, and we joined George Strait in singing Willie Happy Birthday, and so I feel like it's a moment he'll never forget.

So basically, you performed with George Strait and Willie Nelson is what I'm hearing.

That's exactly what I was gonna say. Yeah. I performed headlined. Yeah. With George Strait to sing Happy Birthday to Willie Nelson, your dear friend. Yeah, my dear friend Willie. That's what I've been up to. You've been working or just generally hanging out doing nothing.

I actually had two trips to Las Vegas in about eight days. I flew in for dinner on a deal that we were doing to talk with some folks on one of the companies that's one of our portfolio companies, and then flew back. That was just literally for dinner. And it didn't work out because I didn't want to stay in Vegas the whole weekend. But then I had to fly back out Tuesday. I flew out Thursday for dinner, flew back Friday, then had the weekend with my family, and then flew back on Tuesday and was there for four days speaking at a private equity event that had a thousand private equity fund managers, which is pretty cool. And in endless meetings as it always, you know, as, you know, because we go traveling, you guys should know whenever you travel with me, if you're a business partner, I will go traveling. And Ryan's like, that's great. We're going to be in Vegas, we're going to hang out, it's going to be nice. We'll relax, we'll have some fun. And I'm like, well, we have 400 meetings scheduled.

So yeah, it's the absolute don't go to. That's why Roland doesn't get invited on the vacations. If Roland is there, he might brand it as a vacation, but it's a trip. It's like going on a quote unquote family vacation. It's like, that's a family trip. So I want to hear about the private equity people thing. We didn't talk about this at all. Any cool breakthroughs of that?

Well, it was, it was actually really interesting because I've had like, you have your stuff that you prepare that you talk about and then occasionally things will happen and you get invited to speak in front of groups. We always ask, you know what, what does your audience need? What's their biggest challenge? How can we help them the most? I had three in a row within eight days that were completely unrelated. So the first one was speaking to a group of people at a, at a credit building conference for entrepreneurs. And so talking about one of the things I, you know, I could talk about was, well, one of the reasons you want business credit is to help with acquisitions. But I ended up with a presentation of 17 different uses of business credit to grow your business. And that was to, I don't know how many several thousand people that were, that were business credit people with one of our partners in one of our businesses. Then I spoke to Cameron Herald's group of CEOs. So now I'm speaking to a whole bunch of CEO about stuff. So I talked about inflation, which I talked about at War Room. So that one was less hard, but I had to dial it in a little. And then these private equity guys, I asked the event coordinator, I was like, well, tell me about the audience. And he's like, okay, well, your audience is like 1200 people. They're all private equity fund managers. They're either real estate fund managers or hedge fund managers or crypto fund managers or private equity fund managers or. And I'm like, well, that's a lot of different people. So I had to create. Yeah, man, I had the hardest. That's probably the hardest one I've come up with in years, maybe 10 years to do. And I like, even up until the day before, they're like, hey, can we get your slides? And I'm like, I don't have any, because you guys are not helping me understand what is going to be best for these people. And I finally. I was just reading like crazy because that's how I get my inspiration for these things. And I found an article about alpha. And alpha is when you achieve outsized results, higher returns on an investment portfolio without accepting asymmetrical or greater risk than the average. And so I was like, well, that's great. So I'm going to talk about achieving alpha, and then I can talk about achieving alpha across all these different funds, and then some core principles for how you do that and then some tools for sourcing deals, because one of the ways you can do that is to get into deals without them being into a bidding war. And it was really fun and I really enjoyed it. I loved speaking. The guys that put it on, they're very young. They're called Wall Street Rebels. They've got a great podcast that other people might want to listen to. There's a little plug for them, but. And they're really about, like, how do you increase your ability to scale and grow, which we're all about, at Scalable Co. And do it with raising funds, which we. To do a lot of things, like, how can you do things at EPIC with little or no money out of pocket? But also, one thing that is on our roadmap is to talk about how do you do things when you have money? And so it was really cool getting to talk with all those people and see what they're doing and what they're investing in and how they're getting investors and things like that. So it was. It was fun. That was like, those three things with three presentations and two of them being Completely new with travel and everything. It was a very, very, very hectic week.

Sort of like a nice, lovely hike through the Sedona. Yeah. So, okay, I know we got, we got other stuff on the agenda we want to talk about, but I want to hear kind of what. I mean, this is business lunch, right? So this is like what would we be talking about if we were just having lunch? So if we were just having lunch, you tell me that. I want to know. I'm sure our listeners do. What's kind of the 80, 20 of the achieving Alpha? Like, what'd you tell them? Can you break that down in any kind of, you know, summary without necessarily pulling up 15 billion slides? Or should we kick that can for another episode?

Yeah, let's take that on another one. I would like to talk about that and I would like to talk about the inflation thing that both you and Rich and I talked about in separate presentations for a whole business lunch. I think that would be really cool too. So as we're jotting down ideas, but you mentioned something when we first started here that I would like to ask you about, which is you said that you're trying to be more intentional about getting away and focusing and things like that. I'd love to talk about what is the optimal way to structure, in your opinion, and I know I've got mine right on. What's the optimal way to structure your workweek? You got the book Four Hour Work Week that just started a whole movement with Tim Ferriss years ago. And Tim of course works about 400 hours a week. So I think it would be fun to talk about. Is that possible? Is it a four hour work week? Is it an 18 hour week? Is it a 70 hour week? What do you think is ideal and how do you get there?

Yeah, so I. This is, this has been kind of like for the last few weeks this has been my primary subject like that I've been really studying because I feel like I've gotten very out of balance and I don't like to use that term balance. To me it's about alignment.

Right.

So aligning kind of. Yeah, well, I mean. And grossly out of alignment. Right. So we've just been hustling and moving and kind of my personal goals have gotten out of alignment with my professional goals. Right. So it's not that I mind working. Right. And this idea, again, I think balance for an entrepreneur, it just brings up this kind of image of this Zen like state that I don't know is necessarily ever truly achievable or Even something that we all necessarily want. But I do believe there should be ongoing alignment, right. Where you can point at the efforts that you're doing now and you can see how it clearly aligns. And I just felt like it had gone out of. Out of whack. And I just got in a habit of work, right? We've been working so hard that just working became the habit. And so to sort of had an opportunity was leaving town. I was like, this is a good reset, so let's use this. It was also just kind of do some self study. And I went back the times when I was the most productive, which for me was kind of fun and easy. Cause I journal and I maintain a work diary, like every. And I've done this for the last five years. I go in and I write down what I do every 30 minutes, right? So I just maintain a little. This is what I did, you know, on that day. So for me, calendars, like my online calendar, that's how I measure what. That's how I keep track of what I'm going to do, right? So I've got my Google calendar that tells me my appointments that I have that day. But I then have a, you know, a physical calendar where kind of at the end of every day, a couple times I'll just block out from this time to this time. I generally did this. And it's something just. It's a time study. I started doing it because our business partner, Richard, this was years ago, he came to me, was like, I'm so busy, I'm so overwhelmed. And I was like, he's like, I think we need to hire more people. I was like, let's first figure out why you're busy and overwhelmed. Do a time study. And I was like, I'll do it with you. And it was so valuable that I just kept doing it. So I went back and I just.

Examined as an attorney, billing every 15 minutes. And so to me, that's my nightmare now. But. But I did get a very good idea and I do think it's great. As a matter of fact, I was just talking to one of our business partners this morning about that because he's like, you know, man, I just don't have a life. And I said the same thing. I said, you got to figure out what you're spending time on, that you should be outsourcing. And then we talked about what the outsourcing things were like, or delegating or hiring for. And. And he picked the thing that he was actually the best at. And I'm like, that's your highest and best use. That's not what we want to outsource. We want to figure out what's the other stuff. So I agree with you. I think that doing that even for a week is very, very insightful, very powerful.

It's incredible. Yeah. Incredibly instructive. And you can also do it retrospectively. Right. It's a little bit harder. But if you do maintain a calendar, you can go back and look. But I'll tell you this, so I'll ask everybody right now, listening. What did you do last week? If you have no idea, there's a good chance that nothing significant happened. Right. And so, and what that generally means is that we're kind of trapped in this cycle of just doing menial work, which means that we're not being as intentional as entrepreneurs. We're just not being as intentional. So I went back and I looked over like, what were the times when I was the most really productive from an output perspective? So not when was I quote unquote, working the most, but when was I producing the most output? And what I discovered, because you said on one hand you've got the extreme, the Tim Ferriss four hour workweek, which, you know, that's a bit hyperbolic. Even Tim was like, you're going to need to work more than four hours, but you got the four hour work week on this end. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got kind of the hustle and grind, like all the Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, crazy people out there and the Elon Musk, you need to work at least, you know, 500 hours a week. It's like it's mathematically not possible. But these are the spectrum, right? This is the spectrum that we have. It's either four hours, that's your life, you know, laptop lifestyle, you know, really trying to optimize for personal leisure and personal lifestyle. And on the other end of the spectrum, you know, you got people who are trying to maximize impact output and entrepreneurs sort of asked to choose between them. I reject both of those. But in rejecting them, where most of us land is kind of somewhere in the middle, which is the wage earner, that 40 to 60 hour range. And that's kind of where we get. And that's, that's where I was working, you know, and fill in time with a lot of menial. So when I went back and looked, I found the answer was about 20 hours a week. Like 20 hours a week. And what I, what I did then is I constrained my time. I remember I, like, I went back, I was most productive. I had Fridays completely blocked off and I actually took Friday off. Right. And then on any other day, I would basically block out, you know, four to five hours and then the rest of it I would read, I would leave, I would. I wasn't at work. Work didn't happen to me and that's when I was the most effective. So, yeah, I believe I've got. I think it's. The 20 hour workweek is what's ideal for entrepreneurs. And I think by constraining ourselves to that, you do better work, you do less.

So you're saying five hours a day, four hours, four days a week. Is that the idea or is it just 20 hours? However you want.

Yeah, I mean, so I was going back and the number was 20 for me. And but how exactly it got broken up was really dependent upon the season. So there were times when it was. I would work like eight hours, you know, do. Do like a full workday, you know, Monday, Tuesday, you know, Wednesday kind of thing, and then would only work a little bit on Thursday and nothing on Friday. So I think it just depends on what's best for you.

How did you determine 20?

That's just what the data was like. So when I went back and looked and like, when was I most.

How did you look at the data? Because. Because I think people are be like, you know, okay, well, okay, I see all my stuff and I see how I spent my time. I don't know how I figure out how many hours.

So I looked at, because again, I've documented every 30 minutes. It was just going through and looking at, okay, this season, from this month to this month, I was, the output was incredible. When did I work? And so I was able just to go through and tabulate it up day by day. So it was manual, just going through and looking at it. So I don't know that anybody, unless you had literally been keeping a work diary for the last five years, if it would be as easy to do this. But it was 20 hours. And I went and I actually asked people polled Twitter, like, how many truly productive hours of work do you average in a day? And Most people, like 50% said 3 to 4, 25% said 1 to 2.

I think hours per day. Yeah, I think that like, I've seen polls of like actual productive time for CEOs. It's like five hours a week. I mean, of actual. Because they spend so much time in meetings and things like that. There's just so Many distractions. And that those meetings are like weekly meetings, which I think is not a great idea. Like, because I have one that I just had to cancel that somebody tried to set up. And I was like, no, we don't have anything to say and it's dumb. And let's just like, let's say that generally that's a time that we can be available if we've got something to talk about. But boy, they're just. It's like there's so much meeting creep in your calendar if you're not careful that you can spend your whole time, your whole day just doing that stuff and accomplishing. Yeah.

And that's where. So I went back and I looked and what I found was that there I kind of started putting into categories. And so I found that there's basically like four categories of work. As an entrepreneur, let's take a little.

Break to let some of our people who are helping us make this stuff happen. And then let's come back and talk about those four categories of work and how everybody can do this. How's that sound?

I like it. Ryan here. And look, if you're an entrepreneur, you're busy, right? Whether it's replying to emails or scheduling meetings, whatever, there is a lot of work and a lot of hats that we need to wear as entrepreneurs. And that's why as entrepreneurs, as especially if you're a visionary founder, you need help, right? And I don't know about you, but at one point for me, I was getting so overwhelmed with all the little day to day tasks that, let's face it, they gotta get done, but they don't necessarily need to get done by you. And so when I came to this realization, I said, I gotta get help. I need to get a virtual assistant. I gotta get a social media manager. And that's when I called my friends at Belay Solutions. Belay Solutions are an incredible organization. Now look, I don't know about you, but I tried to work with VAs in the past. It was, it was always a disaster. And so I was really, really suspicious of being able to make it work. But their process was fantastic. They found out the type of work that I need done, the type of people I like to work with, and they really did match me with a perfect virtual executive assistant. And this person's been with me now for three years and counting. So obviously it worked for me and I think it's going to work for you. So here's what you need to do. All right? The good folks at Belay they're actually giving listeners to this podcast $300 off the startup cost for their virtual assistants. You'll pay less than I did. Here's what you need to do. Text lunch. All right. Text lunch. L U n c h to 55123. Again, that's text LUNCH to 55123. To talk to Belay about getting a virtual assistant of your own. You need it. You know you do, and they can make it happen.

And we're back. Okay, so you say you got four categories of work. Talk to us about that.

Yeah, so I went and I did. I did this big brain dump of all the stuff that I was doing. I said before I like, basically about 20 hours, right. Was kind of how it was going. And so I was like, okay, what was I doing during that time? And it was pretty easy to break it into for me, the type of work that I was doing. But then I looked overall, like, what are kind of the broader categories of work for the entrepreneur? And I realized they kind of fell into four groups. The first is what I'm calling, like your flow state work. Right? So this is like your genius work. This is the work that it's high leverage, high value. If you've achieved any level of success. This is you kind of doing the voodoo that you do so well. Right? There's kind of like that flow state work. And so that's kind of like the first category. That's what most of us want to optimize for. The second category is collaborative work. And so that is when we need to do meetings. Like sometimes you just do. And meetings could be with your internal team or it could be if you're an entrepreneur, maybe you're meeting with clients, doing sales meetings and things like that. Right. The third category is menial work. So this is just your chores, your tasks. Right? This is the one. So the two that expand the most are collaborative work. So allowing meetings to creep and allowing more of them to come in. And then that menial work, just letting yourself just kind of do. Check email forever. Now, checking email could be, if you're an email marketer, maybe you're checking email to really see what's exactly. Maybe you checking email could be in your flow state. So somebody's menial work could be somebody else's flow state work.

What's the fourth?

The fourth is restorative work. All right? And so this is. It's not like just the passive, like doom scrolling, shutting your brain down on social media. This is when, like, for me, it's reading Right. It's learning, maybe it's actually getting coached and mentored. But this is work that is designed for recovery but also growth. But I think the key difference is it's got to be active. So this isn't just passive shutting down your brain like sleeping. We all need that. But the restorative work is the work that we do to actually grow and actually get renewed. And what I found is the stuff that, that expands is the collaborative work and the menial work. And it expands at the expense of flow state work and restorative work. And so by compressing and saying like, I'm only going to allow myself these 20 hours and then that that's it, you can better budget and plan in. This is when I'm going to do flow state work. This is when I'm going to budget in, you know, restorative work, collaborative work. And you can just get a lot more intentional through the constraint. Now as entrepreneurs in seasons, we're going to let the 20 slip into 30, 40, 80. There's obviously times when it's like, let's go all in, let's go nuts. So I don't think you have to be like militant about this. But if you're not intentional from the start, you wind up where I've been just the last couple of months where it gets out of control and you look behind you like what I do.

So that's cool. So yeah, a few things for me is I like you. Fridays, I take off Monday. Today is a day for creating content. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are days for getting other stuff done and then Fridays off. And I've really been focused on Saturdays and Sundays, not even doing what you would call restorative because I am actually very passionate about all the things I do as you are. And so I tend to read and do all of those things that would be considered that would fall into that category of restorative for you. And I've actually tried to not do those things to make myself get the time away. That makes me more productive. And I agree with you 100%. That's what I find happens. So, so it's four days, it's a four day work week. And. And then within those, I don't really constrain myself to 20 hours. I work a lot because I. But I also really, really like it. Like it gives me energy, it doesn't wear me out. It actually makes me, you know, I love doing this stuff. But one thing that was super helpful for me and I would say it would be kind of interesting for you to consider maybe taking these four categories that you've got and putting them into something similar to the Eisenhower matrix. And the Eisenhower matrix, for those of you who don't know. Basically, Dwight Eisenhower managed his time because he had so many things going on during the world wars and as a president and everything. And he said, is it important or not important? And is it urgent or not not urgent? And every. The only thing he really spent any time on was urgent and important. And I think that's kind of a good way to look at like. Like if you're looking at those four categories and then maybe there's a ranking or something that gets you over to Eisenhower, because that's really, for me, what's helped me to open my time starting in 2019. At the end of 2019, just before the pandemic hit, I was looking at my goals for 2020, and I was like, man, I spend so much time that is not productive. And it's. It's mostly talking to other people in meetings, right? So that. That would qualify for a meeting. People that are like, can I pick your brain? Can I ask advice? And you're. You want to help people. You're generous. You are as well. Most of you that are listening, I think probably fall into that same category where you want to help people, but it wasn't actually helpful to them because they weren't doing anything with the conversations we had. And the meetings didn't go anywhere. And the things that came out of the meetings didn't go anywhere for a lot of. I'd say the majority of what I was doing. So I decided I was like, I'm going to take Fridays off. I'm going to put Monday as content so I can get all that done. Because if you're creating content on a sporadic basis, it's really hard to get done what you need to get done. It's so much easier if you've got it all organized and laid out. I'm going to get a team to lay out that. So that it's all set out just like we were talking about with Hector before we went on the podcast here. And, you know, as far as, like, what is. You're a producer, you give me stuff to talk about and you give me those things, and then I can riff on it because I know a lot about it, but give me some guidance here, you know, do some research, give me some data, tell me what's needed. So then basically started charging. And so that weeds out almost everybody because it's gone from. I sent out maybe 20 messages last night or this morning, as depends on how you categories, but like four in the morning, but I sent out about 20 messages that are text replacement messages I have on my computer that I just type consult. And it does this long blurb that.

Says, these are people who are asking to pick your brain. They're asking you to follow up.

They want to get together, whatever. The other thing that I found is super helpful is I say is they want to hop on a call or a zoom or something. I won't do it anymore. So I say, tell you what, I'm happy to chat here and if we get to a point where there's an actionable item for us to discuss, I'll get on a call. And you would not believe how much that has helped because. And we talked about this with Hector before this meeting also, Hector is like, let's hop on a call. And you're like, well, let's do this asynchronously. Let's do this.

And those who don't know Hector, Hector is the producer of this fine show. Yes.

Yeah, shout out to Hector. So he has the best last name. He should be like the most interesting man in the world Hector sends about. But that hopping like that. Avoid hopping on a call. Never hop on a fricking call unless you know exactly what the outcome of the call is going to be in advance. Like, what, what is your desired outcome from that? And resolution for the outcome can happen on the call. That's giant. So, like, charge for your time. Don't get on the call with anybody that you can do without getting on a call. And then also, like, when I was going to Vegas, I had a, like, I didn't even post about it, I don't think. And I had all these people reaching out. I was like, hey, you know, hadn't seen you. Let's get together. And I'm like think to myself now I say, to what end? To what end? If I want to meet you as a friend, I will meet you as a friend and we'll have dinner. And we don't generally talk about business, we talk about other things. Right. But to what end? And so like that, that made it very easy for me to say, you know, man, my calendar's full, because it is. And I'm not going to make room. I'm not going to eat up that valuable flow state time by just hanging out. Because to what end? It's like if we're not friends already or somebody that I want to get to connect with as a friend, And I see, or I see a business thing coming from it, I just don't do it anymore. And that has been really helpful. So then it falls. So going back to the Eisenhower just to kind of tie it together for everybody and then I'd love to hear your thoughts on tying your thing into that as well is if it's important and urgent, then you do it. If it is unimportant and not urgent, it doesn't get done, it gets deleted. And if it falls into the other two boxes, then you delegate it to somebody else. And I, that I live by that. So like my schedule is down to the minute, I mean literally to the minute. And, and it makes me so much more, so much more productive. I got all of my three days out of seven back 100%. I'm forcing myself to be restorative and to have balance. It's forced balance. It's not, that's like, that's work by the way. And it's a constant fight to fend off those people that want to have the meetings and they come in with their energy vampire fangs and try to get it from you. But with that rant and ramble, how would maybe you take the advantages of what of that very to me like really, really valuable, life changing thing, the Eisenhower matrix, and apply that to these four kinds of work. Or, or would you.

Yeah, I mean so what we plotted on, what I, what I plotted mine on is, is on, I guess that's the, the up, down one. I think that's the Y axis. So impact versus like complexity. And complexity is just a way of saying I can do it. Like complexity is not quite the right word because it's like I can do it really well and, but it may be too complex for somebody else. And so yeah, those things that are high impact, high complexity, I need to do that. And that's generally me and my flow state. Right. And so what I'm looking at there is I love doing it, I'm really, really good at it. And it aligns like that's kind of to know flow state. Like it's, you enjoy doing it, it's energy giving, you know, you're best in class at it and it delivers a meaningful result for your personal and professional goals which are hopefully aligned. Right. So there's plenty of things that you can love doing that you're great at doing, but that doesn't deliver a positive result. Right. You could be really great at scrolling through social media and love it, but not a positive result.

So that I like impact, I Don't like complexity though.

This is all still new, right? So if you got a better word than that. But basically, yeah, it's impact. And then it's kind of almost like native genius is maybe like high native genius, low native genius. So the high impact stuff where it's high native genius, that's me in my flow state, that's me loving life. If you move over where high impact, low native genius, that's going to be more difficult for me, right? So I like doing it, I may even like doing it because it's high impact, but I'm not that great at it. And you just got to delegate that stuff, right? And so that's important, but not flow state. And, and, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's menial, right? The menial is the stuff that's kind of low impact, low complexity, low genius definitely either get rid of it or whatever. But the things that are, that are like high genius, where the danger zone is, I'll tell you, high native genius, low impact, high native genius, low impact, that's where you got to be really, really careful. Those are the things that can get you stuck. Now if that happens to be restorative, right? Sometimes impact is a function of time, right? So for me, going in and reading, studying, learning, doing all the stuff you've talked about, it's highly restorative. It may not yield fruit, but it just kind of gets me going. If I can say like this is restorative, then I'll make time for it. Because if it's going to find time within my arbitrarily compressed 20 hour period, right. Then it needs to fit into one of those four categories.

So will you not read about stuff outside of the 20 hours? Will you not read work learning type stuff outside of that?

Yeah, I will. So my rule is I'm going to budget my 20 hours and I'm going to budget all of those in. And the only one that is allowed, sorry, the only two that are allowed to expand are flow state and restorative. So because sometimes you get in the flow, right? Because both of those are energy giving, right? Both of those give you more energy. But I don't know, I could decide that I'm going to read this and it's going to give me all this energy and I'm going to get engaged. Sometimes it doesn't happen, right? Sometimes restorative work, it just you're not feeling in that moment you plan on reading something and it's not as good as you thought it would be, right? Or it just doesn't take you in a direction you thought. And so what I'm doing is I'm giving my permission myself. Permission to stop. Right. Sometimes I'm going to start working on something and it is my first to.

Finish a book.

Not in that moment. And I've broken myself of that habit as well. I used to.

That's a tough one, right?

I used to. Yeah. Yeah, I've broken myself of that habit.

This is awful. This is continuing to be awful. On page 228. Right.

I've also started giving books away. Like, I used to feel like I had to keep every single book. I don't even want it if it wasn't great. If there's one little morsel in it, then. Then I'll keep it and I may go back and reference it later. But, yeah, I don't feel the need to do that. My problem is I feel like I need to complete something in a given setting. So in saying, like, this is where I'm cutting it off, I give myself permission to stop and reset. And so it just kind of depends. Like, I don't. I'm not necessarily. I'm rarely doing all four of those in one day. Like what you said for me Monday, I like doing collaborative work on Mondays.

Meeting Monday, I like that a lot.

Like, whereas you are generally doing creative work more like, you know, I don't know if you would consider creative to be flow state for you. For me, it is, and it's my favorite thing. Yeah. So that to me is Tuesday, because I want to know that I've done all the meetings and that there's nothing else hanging over my head. And that may change, right? That absolutely may change. But the two that I will allow to go over budget, so to speak, is that flow state work and the restorative. But the ones that always want to claim excess budget is the collaborative, you know, and the menial. So if I can stamp those down, call them what they are.

So I think just to wrap up what we need, what would be good would be for all of you that are listening and watching to maybe give us some ideas. What do you think of impact and complexity? What do you think of that as a matrix? And is there maybe something. Because I think impact is great. I like it because it means so much to so many people. And it means more than just like, it's something that's important, as on Eisenhower, or it's. It's critical. Is it going to actually impact? Is it going to have positive impact? Is it going to impact me? Is it going to impact the world? Is it going to impact my company in some way beyond just it being important?

It probably should be like impact talent or impact native genius. Right?

Because that's what we're looking for. That one's the tough one because it's like you're looking for kind of is it impactful and it can't be delegated. The only problem is if you use delegable and non delegable, then what is your action step? Well, you know, it's, it's already telling you what it is. So it's kind of a one way matrix. But I do think that's really helpful because I think something could be highly complex. Like it could be a legal thing, an SEO thing. You know, think of any complex thing that people do, an engineering, product creation thing, software program that could all be complex but definitely outsourced. And if that's not your genius thing, it's got a, it's got to go. So I do like genius or superpower or something like that. I think, I think that's, I like that. And maybe you just say, just if we're looking for one word, maybe it's impact and genius, you know, and we know that genius refers to you.

But I'd love to give people like.

If you're, if you would comment on this or you know, reach out and let us know on social, what do you like for that? Because I think this is, this is cool. The IG matrix is pretty fun.

I think the key is look at, I mean, so what I would tell you just as an action item, like do a brain dump of all the stuff that you've been doing, all of your tasks, go look back a week if you got a calendar and maybe do it forward. But begin to say like what kind of work am I doing? And then put it in these four categories and just decide like how are your ratios going right now? Because if your ratios are way off, if you're spending a tenth of your time on flow state work and the vast majority of it on menial tasks, well, there's, there's your problem. Right, solved. And then I would encourage just like you would a personal budget, like budget your time and decide when you're going to do stuff. You'll break it from time to time. But if you're, if you're intentional on the front end, you're going to get far better results on the other end. The last bit that I'll tell folks that I discovered, and I think this is the case for all high performers, your flow state work, I kind of compared it to like cotton candy versus chocolate cake. Right. We think, like, we think that a lot of the work that we do is like cotton candy and that we can, as entrepreneurs, we can produce work and our team will just consume it. Like if you've ever eaten cotton candy, you know, you eat some cotton candy, it immediately dissolves, it's gone. Right? That is not the work of the entrepreneur. The work of the entrepreneur is like a big, thick, triple decker slice of chocolate cake. Like your team, your company can only consume so much of the type of work that you bring to it. So I wouldn't feel like, you know, you need to spend 20 hours a week in flow state work. You probably can't sustain it and your company probably can't metabolize it is the reality. So in any given day you might only have like, would you say the CEO's only doing three to five hours? Yeah. My guess is five hours a week of flow state work is probably about the max that your company can consume. So don't feel a lot of guilt around this. And when you're doing high leverage collaborative work, right, that's producing flow states in others. And the key thing to limit is just that, that, that menial work and give yourself time to, to restore so you don't burn out.

But yeah, and, and, and also your chocolate cake. Yeah, I like that. And entrepreneurial cake, that's a good podcast. And, and also just some of the, some of the little things that you can do, like don't have a meeting for something that can be done without a meeting. Right. Don't have, figure out how to get rid of all the things that, that if you're asking yourself, to what end? To what end am I doing this? And that, that's been a game changer for me. To what end? I honestly can't answer that. Therefore I shouldn't do it. Right. That's a big thing. Also, I'm fully committed instead of no, you know, I'd love to help you there, but I'm fully committed. Well, what are you committed to? I'm committed to my 20 hour week or whatever schedule you've decided for yourself and then get out. Like, I'm completely off of social except for replying to people who are on my social, which I still feel is important for a connection. And, and all my notifications on the phone, My phone never rings, it doesn't buzz me, the little badges are turned off. There's no, you know, 5,000 emails or messages that are waiting, I don't tie yourself to that so that you can chunk your time and not get interrupted because the talk about flow state getting ripped out of that and then trying to get back to it, that's a huge productivity killer. So some of those things, the Eisenhower matrix and maybe the Impact genius metric matrix that Brian created, all things right.

Here on the fly. Yeah, you saw it happen.

That you guys can use. So thanks for being here today. If you liked what we talked about and you would like to hear more, please subscribe. If you liked what we talked about also please give us a five star rating and that way other people will be able to discover this too. We really appreciate you being here and we will see you next time. Ryan, thank you for being here too.

Thanks sir.

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