ATHLLC2489325680

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.280 | - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks,

00:00:05.360 | a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

00:00:08.160 | I'm your host, Chris Hutchins,

00:00:09.400 | and I've recently gotten a ton of questions from you,

00:00:12.120 | and even from friends and past colleagues

00:00:14.160 | about time management, delegation,

00:00:16.280 | and specifically about hiring and working

00:00:18.700 | with an assistant or EA.

00:00:20.560 | So I thought it would be a great idea

00:00:22.760 | to invite my friend and founder of Levels, Sam Korkos,

00:00:26.160 | who is an absolute expert at delegation,

00:00:29.220 | to talk about delegation broadly,

00:00:31.260 | as well as the entire process

00:00:33.000 | from assessing the need to hire an EA,

00:00:35.100 | ways to hire one, how to work with them,

00:00:37.240 | and some challenges that may come up.

00:00:39.520 | Believe it or not, Sam has four EAs,

00:00:42.140 | including one he's worked with for over 10 years,

00:00:45.120 | and yet somehow has never actually had

00:00:47.640 | a synchronous one-on-one direct conversation with her.

00:00:50.760 | In addition to all that, Sam shares my passion

00:00:53.160 | for using software, automation, services,

00:00:55.360 | shortcuts, and now AI to outsource, onboard,

00:00:58.700 | and optimize so much of his life,

00:01:00.760 | and he is so good at it.

00:01:02.660 | So I hope that this is really a masterclass

00:01:05.200 | in all things delegation and focusing on what matters.

00:01:09.100 | And if you noticed the length of this episode

00:01:11.040 | and thought, "Wow, that's way too long,"

00:01:13.160 | I tried to edit out as much as I could,

00:01:15.880 | but I wanted to leave all the good stuff,

00:01:17.560 | and there was just so much.

00:01:19.480 | So my goal is that even if you listen to it

00:01:21.840 | in its entirety at 1x speed,

00:01:24.360 | I think you'll save more than that much time,

00:01:26.720 | if not 10, 100, or even 1,000 times more time

00:01:30.540 | by putting some of what you learn into place.

00:01:33.020 | And to help with that, I worked with the team at Oceans,

00:01:35.620 | which is a company I use to find

00:01:37.460 | my amazing assistant, Pasani,

00:01:39.440 | to put together a guide that covers 10 tactical steps

00:01:42.740 | you need to take before, during,

00:01:45.180 | and after hiring an assistant

00:01:47.180 | to create a paradigm shift in the way you work.

00:01:50.000 | It covers everything from changing your mindset

00:01:52.220 | to training yourself to delegate and more.

00:01:55.020 | If you wanna check it out,

00:01:56.140 | it's totally free, just go to the link in the show notes

00:01:58.980 | or go to allthehacks.com/delegate.

00:02:02.920 | Or if you're interested in getting an assistant,

00:02:04.800 | you can check out oceansxyz.com,

00:02:07.380 | and I'm pretty sure that if you tell them

00:02:08.980 | you heard about it here, they will hook you up with a deal.

00:02:12.040 | Okay, I am so excited for this conversation with Sam,

00:02:14.700 | so let's jump in right after this.

00:02:16.940 | Do you all remember episode 122

00:02:20.460 | when I spoke to chef David Chang

00:02:22.500 | about leveling up your cooking at home?

00:02:24.660 | If not, definitely go back and give it a listen,

00:02:27.020 | but one of his top hacks was using the microwave more.

00:02:30.480 | I'll admit, I was a skeptic at first,

00:02:32.800 | but after getting a full set

00:02:34.380 | of microwave cookware from Anyday,

00:02:36.420 | I'm a total convert,

00:02:37.860 | and I'm excited to partner with them for this episode.

00:02:40.100 | Anyday is glass cookware specifically designed

00:02:42.880 | to make delicious food from scratch in the microwave,

00:02:45.900 | and honestly, using it feels like a kitchen cheat code

00:02:49.260 | because it speeds up and simplifies the process so much.

00:02:52.940 | The cookware is 100% plastic-free,

00:02:55.300 | and you can cook, serve, store, and reheat

00:02:58.060 | all in the same dish that happens to be dishwasher,

00:03:01.340 | freezer, and oven safe too.

00:03:03.180 | And if you need a recipe suggestion

00:03:04.860 | to kick off your Anyday adventure,

00:03:06.660 | I highly recommend David Chang's Salmon Rice.

00:03:09.440 | It is so good.

00:03:11.340 | And if you haven't checked out the Matte Black IO collection

00:03:14.740 | they launched last year, you have to check it out.

00:03:17.700 | So to get 15% off our new favorite cookware,

00:03:21.140 | go to allthehacks.com/anyday.

00:03:24.420 | Again, that's allthehacks.com/anyday for 15% off.

00:03:29.420 | Sam, thanks for being here.

00:03:33.380 | - Glad to be here.

00:03:34.220 | - I wanna start this conversation off

00:03:35.660 | just talking at a high level

00:03:37.280 | on why delegation is actually important for really anyone.

00:03:41.420 | - I think it's probably the most important skill

00:03:44.020 | to develop as a leader,

00:03:45.660 | to be able to increase your capacity,

00:03:48.540 | to be able to deliver more value.

00:03:51.260 | The amount of time that you have in your life is finite.

00:03:55.020 | And so the only way at a certain point in your career

00:03:57.740 | that you can deliver more value

00:03:59.860 | is to learn how to delegate to other people,

00:04:02.420 | to be able to extend the number of hours

00:04:04.660 | that can be contributed to a certain initiative.

00:04:06.660 | So ultimately everyone who intends to reach some level

00:04:10.740 | of success in their life needs to learn how to delegate.

00:04:13.500 | That's probably the highest level explanation.

00:04:16.180 | - The only pushback I'll give you is you said a leader

00:04:18.300 | and guess we could think about leader more broadly.

00:04:20.940 | The average person listening might think,

00:04:22.300 | oh, this is a skill that's relevant

00:04:24.340 | for people who are running companies or managers.

00:04:27.680 | And I would just say, you'll learn this soon enough,

00:04:29.980 | but with two kids, I feel like time shrinks

00:04:33.640 | because there are more responsibilities at home

00:04:36.220 | and it can also become a really important skill

00:04:39.120 | for anyone beyond just leaders.

00:04:42.340 | And if you expand the definition of leaders bright enough,

00:04:44.580 | then I guess it includes everyone.

00:04:46.300 | - Yeah, and it really depends on how abstract

00:04:48.380 | we wanna go with this, but like in many ways,

00:04:50.820 | you're delegating the labor of growing crops to a farmer

00:04:55.820 | and then you're buying their service,

00:04:57.500 | you're buying the product from them.

00:04:59.260 | So it's just a little, you're already delegating

00:05:02.060 | many, many parts of your life,

00:05:03.380 | whether you realize it or not.

00:05:05.060 | And so in order to achieve anything bigger

00:05:08.260 | than what you would just be able to do by yourself

00:05:10.620 | with limited capacity, you have to be able to learn

00:05:13.420 | how to work with other people.

00:05:14.460 | And that's truly what delegation is.

00:05:16.100 | - It's funny, I was gonna ask you about some of the benefits

00:05:18.140 | you've seen in your life.

00:05:19.020 | And now I'm like, well, one benefit is

00:05:20.340 | you don't have to be a farmer.

00:05:21.500 | (all laughing)

00:05:23.100 | But how do you think, if you rewind and look at now,

00:05:27.740 | becoming great at delegation benefits your life

00:05:30.380 | and changes your life in what way?

00:05:32.060 | - You can do more things.

00:05:33.420 | Often when I'm coaching people that I work with

00:05:36.340 | or talking to friends who are struggling with these things,

00:05:39.340 | one of the biggest challenges that I found

00:05:41.340 | of trying to get people to measure their time,

00:05:45.700 | to put things in their calendar and to measure their time,

00:05:48.900 | I think the biggest reason why people don't want to do it

00:05:52.540 | is that it really, there's an existential dread

00:05:54.860 | that comes with it.

00:05:55.940 | When you have this list of all the places

00:05:58.460 | you wanna go on vacation in your life,

00:06:00.180 | it's like, I wanna go to India, I wanna go to the Bahamas,

00:06:04.780 | I wanna go here, I wanna go there.

00:06:06.860 | It's like, wow, this would be so amazing.

00:06:08.620 | And it's like, great, let's look at the rest of your life

00:06:11.740 | and how much time you have.

00:06:13.420 | And it looks like you get to pick four of those.

00:06:15.620 | That can be a really unpleasant conversation.

00:06:19.620 | And so I think to recognize

00:06:22.140 | that you have a finite amount of time,

00:06:24.500 | and if you want to deliver on anything of value,

00:06:27.980 | you have to figure out how to get better at delegating.

00:06:30.620 | And it doesn't mean that you have to pick one thing

00:06:32.980 | or the other, you don't have to say,

00:06:34.940 | I want to achieve all of these things.

00:06:37.340 | But if you wanna do something like build a piece of software

00:06:41.420 | that you sell to people,

00:06:43.060 | unless you think that you can do all of it,

00:06:45.140 | if you plot out the timeline

00:06:46.700 | of you doing all of these things, like doing a podcast,

00:06:49.820 | some people just do it all themselves,

00:06:51.420 | which is totally fine.

00:06:53.100 | Some people hand off the editing, they delegate that.

00:06:55.780 | Some people hand off the promotion, the distribution,

00:06:58.900 | they hand off a lot of different pieces.

00:07:00.420 | And so you just have to figure out

00:07:02.260 | how far do you wanna take it

00:07:03.820 | and how much leverage can you get

00:07:05.140 | by delegating to other people.

00:07:06.620 | - And if we push in this kind of like product manager way

00:07:09.340 | of the five whys, which I'm guessing you're familiar with,

00:07:12.140 | it's like, well, you have more time, you can do more things,

00:07:13.980 | but like, what's the real benefit?

00:07:15.300 | Do you feel more fulfilled in how you spend your days?

00:07:17.580 | Are you happier?

00:07:18.740 | - One of the major aspects,

00:07:19.820 | and this is coincidentally something

00:07:21.580 | I was talking to somebody about today.

00:07:24.420 | One of the major benefits of delegation

00:07:26.260 | is just learning how to better manage your energy.

00:07:29.660 | And this is sort of a,

00:07:30.980 | I don't know if it's a woo-woo thing to say,

00:07:32.660 | but there are things that take your energy

00:07:35.060 | and there are things that give you energy.

00:07:37.340 | And I think we've all experienced that

00:07:38.980 | of things that you're excited to do

00:07:41.780 | and things that as you're doing them,

00:07:44.460 | it's just crushing your soul.

00:07:46.820 | And you can do some of those soul crushing things

00:07:49.380 | for a little while, but eventually you burn out.

00:07:51.380 | And this is maybe a controversial statement,

00:07:54.500 | but burnout is a choice.

00:07:56.780 | You choose to do things that you do not like to do.

00:07:59.700 | Everything is a choice.

00:08:01.020 | Your job is a choice.

00:08:02.380 | Everything is a choice.

00:08:03.900 | And you can choose whether or not you do it,

00:08:05.980 | whether you hand it to somebody else,

00:08:07.420 | whether you find something else to do.

00:08:09.180 | And so the why of delegation from that lens

00:08:13.020 | is you're choosing a path to do a job

00:08:17.500 | that requires a daily mode of operation

00:08:20.980 | that is sucking the life force out of you.

00:08:24.060 | And so delegation is interesting

00:08:25.780 | because oftentimes the things that you find soul crushing

00:08:29.300 | are things that somebody else actually really enjoys doing.

00:08:31.900 | And then they look at what you're doing.

00:08:33.540 | Like in my world, I really like coding.

00:08:36.060 | I like programming.

00:08:37.220 | I like sitting in a dark room in a cave

00:08:40.100 | and just writing code for like 12 straight hours.

00:08:43.220 | And there are people who look at that and say,

00:08:44.860 | "That is insane. I could never do that."

00:08:47.660 | And then I look at what they do, which is, I don't know, sales.

00:08:50.140 | It's like, "I could never do that.

00:08:51.460 | It is like my worst life is doing sales calls."

00:08:54.580 | But that's what they enjoy.

00:08:55.780 | And there's no right or wrong answer here,

00:08:57.940 | but being able to delegate different skills

00:09:00.100 | for what different people want allows you

00:09:01.500 | to control more of your energy,

00:09:03.180 | and it allows you to have more stamina

00:09:05.260 | and reduce the risk of burnout.

00:09:06.620 | That's one of the major benefits.

00:09:08.500 | - When you say it like that,

00:09:09.620 | I can't imagine someone listening is like,

00:09:10.980 | "Oh, I shouldn't do more of that."

00:09:12.100 | Right? Like, "I want to spend more time

00:09:13.420 | on the things I enjoy in life."

00:09:14.820 | - Yeah.

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00:11:59.540 | - Why do you think more people don't get good at this?

00:12:02.780 | Why aren't more people doing it in their personal life

00:12:04.900 | and their work life?

00:12:05.900 | - It's an interesting question.

00:12:06.860 | I can say there are many different reasons,

00:12:09.820 | some of which are more valid than others.

00:12:12.220 | Just from personal experience talking to people

00:12:14.220 | who've struggled with this,

00:12:16.180 | I would say one is some degree of insecurity

00:12:20.060 | where they feel like they don't like doing this thing,

00:12:24.100 | and so they assume nobody else likes doing this thing.

00:12:26.500 | So they feel a little bit of guilt

00:12:28.240 | handing this task to somebody else

00:12:29.940 | who's also gonna hate doing it.

00:12:32.540 | But that's not necessarily the case.

00:12:34.340 | In fact, in my experience, it's very often not the case.

00:12:36.900 | I think some of it also comes from a place of insecurity

00:12:39.420 | around some imposter syndrome of who am I

00:12:43.420 | to tell somebody else what to do with their time?

00:12:45.980 | And eventually, you just have to get over that,

00:12:47.780 | and you have to learn that the only way to get better

00:12:50.780 | at how to achieve whatever it is you wanna achieve

00:12:53.860 | is to get more comfortable

00:12:55.500 | handing off these tasks to other people.

00:12:57.500 | Some other recent examples is they feel like

00:13:01.240 | these are things that must be done,

00:13:03.700 | and they don't have the resources internally

00:13:05.800 | to be able to hand them off to other people.

00:13:08.340 | If what your company really needs is sales,

00:13:11.820 | and you hate doing sales,

00:13:13.640 | but it is definitely the most important thing,

00:13:15.920 | and you can't hire other people

00:13:17.320 | 'cause you don't have the resources for it,

00:13:19.020 | then you might just have to grind through it

00:13:20.420 | for a little while.

00:13:21.260 | But I think what's important

00:13:22.520 | is figuring out what your exit strategy is.

00:13:24.400 | If it's not the thing that you're excited about,

00:13:27.300 | you should figure out what the script is.

00:13:29.600 | If it really is ROI positive,

00:13:31.940 | eventually you'll be able to hire somebody to do it.

00:13:33.960 | There are a lot of different reasons

00:13:35.140 | why people struggle with it,

00:13:36.340 | but in my experience,

00:13:37.680 | one of the things that I try to do,

00:13:38.900 | I do once a quarter, a think week,

00:13:41.540 | which I just stole from Bill Gates,

00:13:43.540 | where I take one week off from communications,

00:13:47.420 | and I just think and read and write.

00:13:49.880 | And I found that's the right cadence for me

00:13:51.860 | to get pulled out of the hyperactive hive mind of work

00:13:56.660 | and the day-to-day and see the whole forest

00:13:59.520 | and not just the trees.

00:14:01.000 | And so when people are in that mode

00:14:03.940 | of constantly churning and grinding and grinding,

00:14:07.360 | they often lose the big picture of,

00:14:09.180 | should we even be doing this thing at all?

00:14:11.640 | Often the answer is just no.

00:14:13.200 | It's having that space to zoom out

00:14:15.780 | and think about what your major priorities are

00:14:17.480 | is really important.

00:14:18.440 | - I'm gonna go back through a few of the things you said.

00:14:20.140 | So when you talked about the imposter syndrome,

00:14:22.320 | one of the things that made me think

00:14:23.480 | was about your example about farmers,

00:14:25.680 | which was if you ship a package,

00:14:27.920 | you are inherently telling someone

00:14:29.860 | they need to go and deliver your package.

00:14:31.900 | And I think maybe the more we can normalize the fact

00:14:34.360 | that we're delegating lots of things already, right?

00:14:37.400 | You buy something at the grocery store,

00:14:38.840 | someone has to restock that thing, order that thing.

00:14:41.400 | So that was one thing that just made me realize,

00:14:43.440 | well, I'm delegating a lot.

00:14:45.000 | And so if I'm uncomfortable doing it,

00:14:47.200 | I should just get over it.

00:14:48.040 | Like it's just already happened.

00:14:49.380 | And I think that's helpful.

00:14:51.040 | I think part of it is not feeling

00:14:52.480 | like you can tell someone what to do.

00:14:53.580 | And part of it is feeling like maybe

00:14:55.660 | I don't deserve this or it's too elitist.

00:14:59.280 | I don't wanna be the one that tells my family and friends

00:15:01.820 | to interface with my assistant.

00:15:03.780 | This happened to us when I had my EA

00:15:06.940 | try to get our daughter in

00:15:08.040 | for a last minute pediatrician appointment.

00:15:10.800 | And I was like, I feel so ridiculous

00:15:12.740 | calling the pediatrician's office

00:15:15.200 | or having someone else do it and being like,

00:15:16.540 | hey, could my boss's daughter get into the appointment?

00:15:20.420 | And I remember when I got to the pediatrician's office,

00:15:22.380 | I was talking with the person there and I was like,

00:15:24.160 | oh, is this, it was that awkward.

00:15:26.000 | I was just curious.

00:15:27.180 | And the response was like,

00:15:28.860 | no, we do this for the doctors all the time.

00:15:30.760 | Like they were like, this is normal.

00:15:32.560 | Like they were more,

00:15:33.800 | it was all in my head that it was not normal.

00:15:36.100 | Now I will say I've had friends

00:15:37.560 | who've pawned me off to their EAs to like schedule a dinner.

00:15:40.680 | There is a feeling when that happens of like,

00:15:42.780 | well, I thought we were friends.

00:15:44.020 | Now you want me to work with this other person.

00:15:45.880 | Any thoughts around that whole kind of attitude

00:15:49.140 | and do you just have to get over it?

00:15:50.680 | - Some of it is just you have to get over it.

00:15:53.160 | I was talking to somebody not too long ago

00:15:55.800 | where he's really struggling with this.

00:15:58.680 | He's at a point in his life, he has kids.

00:16:01.660 | He has a meaningful amount of personal wealth.

00:16:06.360 | He has a lot of responsibilities

00:16:08.400 | and he's totally underwater.

00:16:10.300 | And I was talking to him, I said,

00:16:11.880 | you need somebody to help you manage your household,

00:16:14.880 | a head of household.

00:16:15.800 | Like this is a role, people do this role.

00:16:18.240 | And he said, I can't because my mom would judge me.

00:16:22.820 | Like my mom would not approve of that

00:16:25.320 | and it would be really difficult.

00:16:27.500 | And I don't know what you do in that situation.

00:16:29.700 | It is something that will hold him back for quite some time.

00:16:32.800 | Just not being able to get over that hurdle.

00:16:35.420 | As soon as he does it, which he will do, it's inevitable

00:16:38.020 | because he is so underwater

00:16:39.900 | with all of his life responsibilities

00:16:41.860 | that there's no way he can manage this.

00:16:44.020 | As soon as he does it,

00:16:45.100 | he's gonna wish that he did it five years earlier

00:16:47.640 | because it's gonna free up so much of his time.

00:16:50.460 | This laundry list of things that he wants to get done

00:16:53.020 | that he doesn't have capacity to do

00:16:54.700 | will all of a sudden start getting done.

00:16:56.940 | And he'll wonder why he waited so long.

00:16:58.620 | I think the answer is probably therapy.

00:17:00.540 | It's like how people get through that.

00:17:03.020 | But I don't see any other solution other than that.

00:17:05.620 | - Let's talk about a few other pain points.

00:17:06.900 | One for me was, I didn't think I had enough

00:17:10.540 | for someone to do.

00:17:11.700 | And maybe this stems from,

00:17:14.040 | and we'll get to how you could actually execute this,

00:17:16.200 | hire an assistant, software, all these tools.

00:17:18.960 | But I had experimented with single task delegation

00:17:23.960 | where you hire a virtual assistant

00:17:26.260 | on the hourly or task basis.

00:17:28.260 | I had pretty poor experiences trying to do that

00:17:30.440 | because there's a certain relationship

00:17:32.080 | that needs to be built.

00:17:32.920 | I now understand that.

00:17:34.260 | But early on, I was like,

00:17:36.420 | well, it's just, it's a lot of,

00:17:37.720 | I don't have enough to fill someone full-time,

00:17:39.520 | so do I need someone part-time?

00:17:40.980 | And it's so much work to ramp them up.

00:17:43.020 | It just felt like too much.

00:17:45.140 | And it felt like I didn't have enough work to justify it.

00:17:48.140 | So I guess I have a bunch of questions.

00:17:49.200 | One, how do you think about that?

00:17:50.740 | And I have some thoughts,

00:17:51.860 | but also the common thing I hear people say is,

00:17:55.300 | well, once you do this,

00:17:56.140 | it'll free you up to spend your time on things

00:17:59.080 | that can probably add a lot more value,

00:18:00.800 | especially when people think,

00:18:01.700 | oh, it's gonna be expensive.

00:18:02.740 | It's, well, once you have this time,

00:18:04.440 | maybe you can create value elsewhere,

00:18:06.400 | but that's so abstract.

00:18:07.980 | So I guess let's break it down and say,

00:18:10.440 | how do you think about the fact that people don't think

00:18:12.040 | they have enough to do?

00:18:13.700 | And then separately, we can talk about

00:18:15.420 | how do you think about the value of what you could do,

00:18:18.740 | but it's very nebulous.

00:18:20.700 | - Yeah, so there's several different branches from that.

00:18:24.340 | I think one is that you probably have more things to do

00:18:28.980 | than you realize.

00:18:30.260 | I have a friend who very recently,

00:18:32.840 | finally went over the hurdle,

00:18:34.720 | got an EA and immediately saw the value.

00:18:40.020 | He's been fighting this for years.

00:18:41.260 | He finally got one.

00:18:42.980 | And within about two months, he had three.

00:18:44.820 | And his major hurdle was,

00:18:47.500 | I just don't feel like I have enough stuff for an EA to do.

00:18:50.660 | And then he got one, freed up a ton of his time,

00:18:53.620 | got two more within a couple of months.

00:18:55.620 | And so part of it is you have to just take the plunge

00:18:58.900 | and see if there is enough work for somebody to do,

00:19:01.460 | especially if you're in a meaningful leadership role,

00:19:03.580 | there's almost always more stuff to do.

00:19:06.380 | I think what helps is if you work with,

00:19:09.860 | typically it would be an agency of some kind

00:19:11.940 | that is specialized in this,

00:19:13.540 | where the EAs are trained to be more proactive.

00:19:16.460 | There's a few of them.

00:19:17.300 | The one that we work with is Athena.

00:19:18.900 | They have a training program to teach the EAs

00:19:20.920 | how to make you 10 times more productive.

00:19:23.200 | That's their shtick.

00:19:24.500 | And so they are trained to be proactive

00:19:28.000 | in finding ways to help you extend your leverage.

00:19:31.780 | Whereas if you find one yourself,

00:19:33.420 | which is totally plausible

00:19:35.180 | and is probably less expensive,

00:19:37.160 | it's a lot more effort for you to have to learn

00:19:40.500 | how to interact with this person,

00:19:41.720 | how to train them onto your systems.

00:19:44.180 | You have to teach them how to do things

00:19:46.380 | as opposed to the EA trying to pull

00:19:50.060 | and get more value from your time.

00:19:52.620 | So I think that's one aspect is having the right pairing,

00:19:56.860 | depending on your level of experience.

00:19:59.060 | If you're a highly experienced alligator,

00:20:00.900 | you can probably go with a less expensive option

00:20:03.260 | and you can do a lot of the training yourself.

00:20:05.140 | Another branch of this, of the not having enough to do,

00:20:08.180 | is really try to lower the perceived risk

00:20:13.180 | of working with an EA.

00:20:15.240 | I was talking to my brother about this very recently,

00:20:18.200 | where I said, he has a lot of things he needs to delegate.

00:20:22.400 | And he said, you should just try hiring a person

00:20:25.180 | with this profile and just see how it goes.

00:20:27.160 | And he's like, yeah, but it's gonna be X dollars per year,

00:20:30.740 | and then there's this, and then there's that.

00:20:32.480 | Imagine, try to frame this as like a two week experiment.

00:20:36.560 | And how much is that gonna cost you?

00:20:38.580 | And if it doesn't work in two weeks,

00:20:39.900 | all you've lost is like $5,000.

00:20:42.620 | Working backwards, do you think it's worth

00:20:44.420 | a $5,000 experiment to see if you can delegate

00:20:48.360 | all of these parts of your life

00:20:49.860 | that you don't really wanna do?

00:20:51.540 | The answer is, well, yeah, obviously, it's worth it.

00:20:54.140 | But when you project out this,

00:20:56.940 | if you view it as a lifelong, fairly expensive commitment,

00:21:01.420 | the burden to get over that hump of,

00:21:05.020 | I should give this a shot, is just,

00:21:07.160 | it can be too high for some people.

00:21:08.940 | So I think lowering that perceived risk threshold

00:21:11.380 | is another one.

00:21:12.500 | - And that's something that I think happens to us

00:21:14.800 | as humans in a lot of ways.

00:21:16.660 | I talk to people about, oh, I wanna quit my job.

00:21:19.060 | And they're like, well, I'm gonna lose out

00:21:20.320 | on my $100,000 a year forever.

00:21:22.600 | And it's like, no, you're gonna lose out

00:21:24.020 | on your $100,000 a year until you do something else

00:21:26.420 | to replace it.

00:21:27.500 | So you could think of it as,

00:21:28.580 | if you think it'll take you three to six months,

00:21:30.740 | you're taking a 25 to $50,000 bet.

00:21:34.180 | And what's possible, and by the way, after tax,

00:21:36.540 | maybe it's half that if you live in California.

00:21:38.380 | And so it just kind of changes that perspective.

00:21:40.980 | So I think that's a really helpful perspective.

00:21:43.420 | And I've told a lot of people that now that I've done this,

00:21:46.380 | I've been like, look, commit to, I say three months.

00:21:48.940 | I feel like two weeks might be short

00:21:51.440 | to really feel the value,

00:21:52.820 | though two weeks in, I felt the value.

00:21:55.740 | But even at three months, it's a small,

00:21:58.580 | in my opinion, price to pay.

00:22:00.600 | And when it comes to what's the upside,

00:22:02.380 | it's like, well, you can get a sense of that

00:22:04.860 | in those three months.

00:22:06.100 | And then I'll just say to the previous thing

00:22:07.980 | you discussed about not having too much to do,

00:22:10.340 | my exercise I recommend people do is just for a week,

00:22:14.100 | just write down every task that you could delegate

00:22:17.180 | to someone who has built up enough context in your life.

00:22:20.980 | And at the end of that week,

00:22:22.500 | you'll probably have a list that you're like,

00:22:24.060 | wow, maybe I do need to.

00:22:26.060 | - For sure, yeah, and it sacks up pretty quickly.

00:22:28.820 | As you flex that muscle, this is, as I mentioned,

00:22:31.300 | a friend who avoided this for a long time

00:22:33.420 | and now has three EAs.

00:22:35.140 | Once you flex that muscle and you learn

00:22:38.080 | what types of things can be delegated,

00:22:40.800 | then you start to see opportunities all around you.

00:22:43.460 | It's something when you learn how to program

00:22:45.340 | for the first time, and then suddenly you discover

00:22:47.640 | all of these things that can be solved in software.

00:22:50.460 | You realize that code can solve

00:22:51.940 | all kinds of automation problems.

00:22:53.940 | So what are some examples?

00:22:55.880 | For software or a delegation? - No, no, for the delegation.

00:22:58.940 | - I'll describe it maybe in the more abstract sense,

00:23:01.220 | which is people often assume that much more context

00:23:04.340 | is necessary than is actually necessary

00:23:07.420 | in order to delegate something.

00:23:09.100 | So a recent example that I had is I have a CRM

00:23:13.840 | where I keep track of all of my friends and people

00:23:17.380 | that I want to stay in touch with.

00:23:18.700 | And we had a situation where the locations

00:23:23.580 | that people were tagged in

00:23:26.800 | were getting a little bit too specific.

00:23:28.660 | Like, do I really want it to say Los Gatos,

00:23:32.660 | or do I want it to say Atherton or Bay Area?

00:23:36.540 | Because really, I don't need that level of specificity.

00:23:38.980 | It makes it much harder to figure out where people are.

00:23:41.580 | And so I just mentioned to my EA,

00:23:44.700 | 'cause I know that I can delegate this to them,

00:23:46.660 | where I said, "Anything that is not a major metro area,

00:23:50.060 | "find the nearest airport and assume

00:23:52.240 | "that that is the major metro area."

00:23:54.220 | 'Cause that's probably where I'll be flying into.

00:23:56.180 | And so they were able to handle that whole task.

00:23:57.900 | And in the past, I probably would have said,

00:23:59.980 | "There's just too much context."

00:24:01.220 | You know, if they're in the Philippines,

00:24:02.340 | they don't know American geography,

00:24:04.300 | so I'm gonna have to go through all of these myself

00:24:06.140 | and fix this.

00:24:07.160 | But if you come up with ways where you realize,

00:24:09.340 | if I create these rules and these general heuristics,

00:24:12.740 | you can delegate it a lot better.

00:24:14.460 | So once you learn what sorts of things

00:24:18.140 | don't require such specialized knowledge,

00:24:20.700 | and also when you lower that risk threshold

00:24:23.340 | of asking somebody to do something in parallel.

00:24:25.860 | Another recent delegation that I did was,

00:24:27.980 | I totally stole this idea from Wiz, one of our investors,

00:24:31.740 | where I thought it would be cool to make

00:24:34.300 | custom Magic the Gathering cards for everyone on our team.

00:24:38.060 | And we have a company directory,

00:24:39.500 | we have a spotlight article,

00:24:40.620 | which has a bunch of background on them.

00:24:42.420 | And so I spent maybe 15 minutes doing some demos

00:24:46.180 | where I said, "All right, here's what I want you to do.

00:24:48.420 | "Go through each person in the company directory,

00:24:50.640 | "take their spotlight article,

00:24:52.240 | "feed it into chat GPT with a prompt like this

00:24:54.860 | "to get some sort of Magic the Gathering style,

00:24:57.320 | "like Ben is the marketing sorcerer,

00:25:00.600 | "and have some abilities and some cool stuff there.

00:25:03.520 | "Feed his images into Mid Journey,

00:25:06.860 | "generate a really cool looking visual

00:25:10.820 | "using his actual face,

00:25:12.720 | "using the prompts that you just generated,

00:25:15.380 | "and then put that onto a Magic card

00:25:17.120 | "and then have that shipped."

00:25:18.460 | It took me 15 minutes to do that delegation,

00:25:20.860 | and it turned out super cool.

00:25:22.780 | And I know enough about how to delegate that now,

00:25:26.420 | whereas five years ago,

00:25:28.300 | I probably would have said, "This is way too hard.

00:25:30.540 | "There's so many intricacies

00:25:32.500 | "of what needs to be done here.

00:25:33.720 | "I wouldn't know how to use the proper language

00:25:36.600 | "to delegate that effectively."

00:25:38.140 | So it just takes a lot of practice

00:25:40.020 | and you need to flex that muscle.

00:25:42.020 | - So we're gonna come back to that language,

00:25:43.420 | but we have a veneer for both kind of work and personal,

00:25:47.240 | which I wanna get to that concept,

00:25:48.740 | but also hired through an agency.

00:25:50.340 | We use an agency called Oceans.

00:25:52.500 | Similarly, appreciate the training that I'm not doing,

00:25:56.500 | the managing I'm not doing, and that kind of stuff.

00:25:59.040 | But we had started putting together a task list

00:26:02.500 | because when you start working with someone,

00:26:04.060 | you need something for them to do.

00:26:05.540 | And it was interesting because she's based in Sri Lanka,

00:26:08.420 | so her day started before we ever met.

00:26:10.740 | So she had about four hours of work before we ever met.

00:26:14.540 | And I was like, "Oh, I can't wait to give context on this."

00:26:16.900 | And so we put something in Notion that was just like,

00:26:20.380 | we need to restain the wood in our backyard.

00:26:24.580 | And that was the prompt.

00:26:26.380 | And I was like, "I can't wait

00:26:27.220 | to give this person more context."

00:26:28.860 | And then we go to the first meeting and I was like,

00:26:30.380 | "Oh, they already found five people in our general area

00:26:34.220 | because they knew where we lived

00:26:35.700 | that can do patio staining 'cause you can search that."

00:26:38.940 | And they had already emailed them and said,

00:26:40.640 | "Hey, what do we need to do to get a quote?"

00:26:42.020 | And I was like, "Oh."

00:26:43.500 | - Exactly.

00:26:44.340 | - Like I didn't realize how easy this was

00:26:46.540 | until I just wrote something.

00:26:48.380 | - I totally agree that you think you need more context

00:26:51.020 | than you need.

00:26:51.860 | I also wanna talk a little bit also

00:26:53.300 | about the language and all that.

00:26:55.620 | But let's talk briefly about finding this person.

00:26:58.540 | So agencies are an option.

00:27:00.380 | You mentioned the one you use, I mentioned the one I use.

00:27:02.460 | We both seem to have great experiences there.

00:27:04.720 | You can hire these people yourselves.

00:27:06.940 | I agree, it usually comes at a lower cost,

00:27:08.700 | but the burden is more on you.

00:27:10.620 | No matter where you go,

00:27:11.860 | I assume you have to do some vetting.

00:27:14.000 | You've hired more EAs than I.

00:27:15.560 | How do you think about that vetting,

00:27:17.340 | even though an agency might do some of it for you,

00:27:20.300 | you still wanna find someone that's a good fit for you.

00:27:22.340 | What have you learned in that process?

00:27:24.220 | - I would say we generally just set very high expectations

00:27:27.280 | for the agency.

00:27:28.540 | I think a lot of the agencies,

00:27:30.140 | I've worked with others in the past,

00:27:32.140 | they'll give you a slate of candidates.

00:27:34.260 | I usually just tell them, "I'm not gonna do this.

00:27:37.020 | "So you tell me which of these is the best

00:27:39.460 | "for what I wanna do.

00:27:40.820 | "And if they don't work, then I'm gonna fire them."

00:27:42.820 | (laughing)

00:27:44.020 | So I'm putting this on you.

00:27:45.940 | This is not a me decision.

00:27:47.820 | This is a you decision.

00:27:49.240 | When a friend of mine who was working at McKinsey

00:27:51.620 | for a partner, and he wrote up a whole slide deck,

00:27:55.060 | and the partner said, "All right, are you absolutely

00:27:57.420 | "confident that this is ready to ship?"

00:27:59.460 | He's like, "Well, let me double check."

00:28:01.500 | And he made some adjustments, he improved it.

00:28:03.460 | He's like, "All right, are you now absolutely confident?"

00:28:05.180 | He's like, "I don't know.

00:28:06.860 | "Let me do a little bit more work."

00:28:08.060 | And he's like, "All right, are you absolutely confident

00:28:09.680 | "this is ready?"

00:28:10.520 | He's like, "Yes."

00:28:11.540 | And he didn't even look at it, he just shipped it.

00:28:13.500 | And he's like, "Look, we hired you

00:28:15.440 | "because this is what you do."

00:28:17.480 | If you work with an agency that you trust,

00:28:19.340 | and you let them do the vetting,

00:28:21.540 | they're gonna know a lot more about the stuff than you will.

00:28:24.140 | The worst case scenario is you just have to rematch

00:28:26.340 | if you work with an agency.

00:28:27.960 | I would say, if you end up working with an individual,

00:28:30.840 | the best way to do it is probably through real work tasks.

00:28:35.840 | So coming up with a task of,

00:28:38.180 | it's almost like a scavenger hunt.

00:28:41.140 | It's like, here are five tasks that I often do.

00:28:44.340 | Here's a loom explaining what I need you to do,

00:28:47.020 | and then just do it.

00:28:48.140 | And the times when I have had that done,

00:28:49.660 | it is remarkable how wrong some of them can be.

00:28:54.040 | And you just know immediately.

00:28:55.740 | I would say the most basic thing that you're looking for

00:28:57.980 | is ability to follow instructions.

00:29:01.260 | It's like, what I want you to do is download this thing,

00:29:04.940 | look up these things, put it in this format,

00:29:07.540 | and then you just do none of those things.

00:29:09.060 | And you just end up with something completely different.

00:29:10.620 | It's like, okay, this is just not gonna work.

00:29:12.480 | So at the most basic, ability to follow instructions,

00:29:15.820 | if you're assessing a candidate,

00:29:17.000 | would probably be the biggest one.

00:29:18.620 | I think the second order to that

00:29:20.980 | would be their ability to be proactive

00:29:24.880 | in finding new things.

00:29:26.500 | I would say, if they follow those instructions

00:29:28.900 | and they can come up with ways of saying,

00:29:31.140 | and I think it would actually be better

00:29:32.800 | if we also did these things,

00:29:34.260 | and maybe you hadn't thought of this as well,

00:29:36.460 | that's a really good sign,

00:29:37.820 | because it's lowering that burden that you have

00:29:41.360 | to think through the process.

00:29:43.100 | Like, as recently as today, one of my EAs said,

00:29:46.900 | "Hey, I noticed I was doing this process for you,

00:29:48.860 | but it's not really getting a lot of engagement.

00:29:50.980 | I think we can probably kill this

00:29:52.540 | and fold it into this other process."

00:29:54.820 | It's like, "Oh yeah, I totally forgot

00:29:56.300 | that we were doing that.

00:29:57.420 | I'm on board."

00:29:58.660 | And so that level of proactivity

00:30:00.700 | is a really important one as well.

00:30:02.700 | I'm sure many other things,

00:30:03.840 | but those are probably the two biggest ones I'd look for.

00:30:06.100 | - Those two were top of my list.

00:30:07.640 | And the third was just the ability

00:30:10.140 | to ask questions if uncertain.

00:30:12.320 | And this, we'll get to kind of cultural challenges,

00:30:15.160 | but there are some people where you give a task

00:30:16.900 | and if they don't know how to do it,

00:30:18.320 | the kind of default answer is, "Well, let's just do it."

00:30:22.280 | And then in some people's, the default answer is,

00:30:24.300 | "Well, let me ask a clarifying question."

00:30:26.000 | And I think for me, once we built up that expectation,

00:30:30.840 | it's like, I'm not always gonna be perfect.

00:30:33.000 | I'm not always gonna give you the context.

00:30:34.920 | But if you don't have it, just ask.

00:30:36.640 | Like, it's okay.

00:30:37.980 | It reminds me of, there are some cultures in Asia

00:30:40.180 | where you tell someone something and they'll just nod

00:30:42.260 | as if they understood, even if they didn't.

00:30:44.300 | It's like, that is not the best quality in an EA,

00:30:47.300 | at least for me.

00:30:48.140 | Maybe this varies person to person.

00:30:49.660 | - Yeah, it's an interesting one

00:30:51.020 | 'cause I definitely hear the clarifying question thing.

00:30:53.740 | The nature of these clarifying questions,

00:30:55.660 | I've actually had to work with a few EAs

00:30:58.220 | who struggle with this,

00:30:59.100 | is try to make it so that your clarifying questions,

00:31:01.860 | I only have to answer yes or no to.

00:31:03.900 | If your clarifying question puts more work onto me,

00:31:06.840 | it is a bad question.

00:31:08.200 | So I don't know if you've had this experience,

00:31:09.880 | but sometimes the clarifying question will be,

00:31:11.720 | you ask them for some basic task.

00:31:13.560 | And like, "Well, what about this?

00:31:14.520 | What if this happens?

00:31:15.360 | What about this?

00:31:16.180 | What about that?"

00:31:17.020 | It's like, "Oh God, I've just spent 10 minutes

00:31:19.440 | clarifying this."

00:31:20.740 | Versus, "It's unclear to me what this would be.

00:31:23.480 | How I interpret this is it's probably this.

00:31:25.840 | Is this correct?"

00:31:26.840 | Yes.

00:31:27.680 | "I assume that what you mean by this is this other thing.

00:31:30.120 | Is that right?"

00:31:31.000 | Yes.

00:31:31.840 | And so always trying to get to a point

00:31:33.520 | where the resolution is just me saying yes or no,

00:31:36.280 | as opposed to putting the burden back onto me

00:31:39.660 | for the clarification,

00:31:40.900 | where I have to think through all the different implications

00:31:45.280 | of different tasks.

00:31:47.040 | I have had that experience.

00:31:48.520 | Totally understand.

00:31:49.480 | I've had it as just a leader with employees as well.

00:31:52.320 | It doesn't apply just to assistants.

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00:34:44.440 | We both talked about two agencies

00:34:45.600 | that I know work with EAs overseas.

00:34:48.400 | How have you thought about working with people

00:34:50.960 | in different time zones, different cultures,

00:34:52.800 | versus in-person, versus remote,

00:34:54.800 | as kind of a few criteria when hiring someone?

00:34:58.280 | - I think it totally depends on the tasks that you need.

00:35:01.840 | So the earlier example I mentioned,

00:35:03.720 | my brother is looking for somebody to work with.

00:35:06.200 | That would be in-person,

00:35:07.400 | because almost all of the things that he needs

00:35:10.180 | would need to be done by somebody who is in-person,

00:35:12.840 | near where he lives.

00:35:13.960 | And so thinking about what it is

00:35:16.600 | that you need people to do,

00:35:17.680 | in my case, most of what I need,

00:35:20.240 | in fact, basically all of what I need,

00:35:23.040 | are background accountability-related tasks.

00:35:26.320 | Just keeping the lights on, keeping the wheels turning,

00:35:29.160 | making sure that I have clear visibility and reporting

00:35:32.100 | on everything that's happening in the business.

00:35:34.420 | And so that doesn't really need to be co-located.

00:35:37.840 | It also really doesn't need to be in the same time zone.

00:35:40.760 | I found that if you have no overlap on time zone,

00:35:43.480 | it can be pretty rough.

00:35:45.200 | Levels is a remote-first company,

00:35:47.880 | but we still say the default time zone expectation

00:35:51.920 | is America's, which is basically California to Brazil.

00:35:55.600 | If you live in the Philippines,

00:35:58.360 | if you live in India, wherever you live,

00:36:00.680 | you need to be available for at least that part of the day.

00:36:04.320 | We don't have a lot of meetings,

00:36:05.360 | so it turns out not to be particularly onerous,

00:36:07.860 | but if we're gonna schedule a meeting,

00:36:09.760 | the entire team is not gonna orient around,

00:36:12.120 | I guess we need to take this at two in the morning

00:36:14.240 | to match the schedule of the person

00:36:16.220 | who's not in this time zone.

00:36:18.000 | Otherwise, you end up running three different companies,

00:36:20.400 | and it's really, really tough.

00:36:21.920 | There was a founder of a fairly large,

00:36:24.560 | fully remote company that I asked,

00:36:26.600 | "Do you have any regrets,

00:36:29.280 | "things that you cannot undo at this point?"

00:36:31.960 | And his biggest regret was not setting

00:36:33.680 | time zone expectations.

00:36:35.520 | He said, "We basically have three

00:36:37.080 | "fully independent companies,

00:36:38.640 | "and coordinating between them is a nightmare."

00:36:41.200 | He said, "If I could do it again,

00:36:42.280 | "I would just say, you can live wherever you want,

00:36:45.160 | "but America's is the time zone,

00:36:47.740 | "and you have to adapt to that."

00:36:50.260 | - I talked to a few companies when we hired REA.

00:36:53.180 | We went with Oceans.

00:36:54.020 | I didn't realize that some of the decisions they made

00:36:56.100 | were just by default making them

00:36:57.740 | because they knew they were better,

00:36:59.260 | and so I didn't know what I was missing

00:37:00.880 | had I gone somewhere else.

00:37:01.980 | But for example, they asked me two or three intakes,

00:37:05.500 | and then said, "We think this person is the best for you."

00:37:08.500 | I never even had to think about it,

00:37:09.660 | which was wonderful. - That's awesome.

00:37:10.580 | - I didn't realize what I could have had to do.

00:37:12.300 | And then the other one was they said,

00:37:13.960 | "We think asynchronous and synchronous communication

00:37:16.960 | "can work together,

00:37:18.240 | "so we are going to have your assistant work

00:37:21.380 | "from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific

00:37:24.220 | "with three more hours asynchronous

00:37:27.220 | "while you're not working."

00:37:28.740 | And I was like, "That sounds good."

00:37:29.820 | I didn't realize the benefit at the beginning,

00:37:32.740 | but it is actually very helpful

00:37:35.060 | to have someone working when you're not working.

00:37:37.500 | So you're signing off at the end of the day,

00:37:39.220 | and you can say, "Here's a few things

00:37:40.500 | "that need to get done,"

00:37:41.480 | and they're done when you wake up in the morning.

00:37:43.780 | - Totally.

00:37:44.620 | - And I didn't realize the benefit of that.

00:37:46.620 | - Yeah, I found it especially useful

00:37:48.300 | 'cause I have almost exactly the same time zone overlap

00:37:51.540 | in terms of when we're live and when we're not.

00:37:54.100 | And the advantage of rescheduling things in the morning

00:37:58.300 | or canceling meetings or anything that would need to happen

00:38:02.020 | that would impact my day

00:38:03.480 | that they can see before I'm even awake

00:38:06.120 | so that it's not a last-minute scramble,

00:38:07.980 | it's already handled by the time I wake up,

00:38:09.900 | which is super handy for sure.

00:38:11.940 | - One other thing you didn't mention

00:38:13.380 | that I thought was worth for some people hearing

00:38:16.580 | is if you choose to go the route

00:38:18.500 | of hiring this person yourself,

00:38:20.100 | you might save 50, 60%.

00:38:22.820 | There are companies that will help you find that person,

00:38:25.340 | like a headhunter agency.

00:38:26.500 | I think one of them's called Shepard,

00:38:27.940 | and they'll help you.

00:38:28.980 | There is this weird emotional burden

00:38:31.300 | of you are now the employer of record.

00:38:33.860 | And you mentioned rematching.

00:38:35.800 | If something doesn't work out,

00:38:37.540 | just ask yourself the question of,

00:38:39.540 | how good are you going to be at rematching

00:38:42.540 | knowing that you are gonna result

00:38:44.380 | in someone losing their job?

00:38:45.940 | If you work with an agency and you rematch,

00:38:48.060 | they'll find another person for that

00:38:49.780 | or another client for that EA.

00:38:51.900 | So I think that's something that, for me,

00:38:54.740 | it's not that I couldn't let someone go.

00:38:56.020 | I've done that in the past and it's never fun,

00:38:58.500 | but I know that I'm paying a premium

00:39:01.300 | to have a lot of the overhead removed.

00:39:04.140 | And I just think, especially for someone

00:39:06.020 | who's trying this out for the first time, like I was,

00:39:08.960 | it has been the right decision for me.

00:39:11.520 | And I'm someone who loves to save money.

00:39:13.180 | - For sure.

00:39:14.020 | The opportunity cost is real.

00:39:15.300 | People often evaluate opportunity cost as $0,

00:39:19.480 | but it's not.

00:39:20.860 | It's very much not $0.

00:39:22.300 | - Yeah, the things that I have now been able to do,

00:39:26.060 | both in terms of free time and just other work projects

00:39:30.040 | that have actually generated revenue is really incredible.

00:39:34.080 | One of the reasons that's possible

00:39:35.660 | is that our EA works both on personal stuff,

00:39:40.300 | family stuff, and work stuff.

00:39:42.980 | Have you seen that to be successful?

00:39:44.680 | I know you've had multiple EAs and I asked myself,

00:39:47.360 | should I have done this separately

00:39:48.560 | and had two and split their work or had them be part-time?

00:39:51.840 | How do you think about that house,

00:39:53.880 | personal version of an EA and work version?

00:39:56.580 | - So I haven't done much of the house stuff,

00:39:58.720 | but certainly the work and personal.

00:40:00.560 | Part of it is for a lot of people, like for me,

00:40:03.860 | there's no line between what is work and what is not work.

00:40:07.360 | Like if I have a personal task

00:40:09.840 | that I'm going to do,

00:40:11.080 | it means I'm just going to be doing less work

00:40:13.160 | because otherwise I'm just gonna be working.

00:40:15.360 | There's no line of I only work X number of hours.

00:40:18.240 | Any minute that I'm spending doing personal things

00:40:20.640 | is a minute that is detracting

00:40:22.160 | from work that I would be doing.

00:40:23.680 | So that might change once we have kids, which is imminent,

00:40:27.800 | but it will definitely change.

00:40:29.800 | - Well, the kids will be a personal thing you're doing

00:40:32.240 | and you'll say, I want to spend time with my child

00:40:34.160 | and I'm not able to work for it,

00:40:35.720 | which will actually make the value of all of this

00:40:38.160 | just so much higher because inherently you will lose time.

00:40:42.780 | And not only will you lose time

00:40:44.700 | 'cause you might just not sleep a lot,

00:40:46.880 | there's a lot of reasons you might lose time,

00:40:48.120 | but you will want to do other things.

00:40:49.800 | And the fact that we had two children

00:40:52.640 | and I want to spend time with them

00:40:54.200 | doesn't mean that there's less work.

00:40:55.760 | Like nothing magically changes.

00:40:58.360 | So you need to get better at this.

00:40:59.720 | - We have some memos internally on how to think about this.

00:41:03.800 | We encourage people on our team

00:41:05.880 | to hand off more of their personal lives

00:41:08.360 | or more of their personal tasks to their EAs,

00:41:11.420 | even though the EAs are paid for by work.

00:41:14.180 | But it really depends a lot on what the task is

00:41:17.640 | and who the person is and what their intent is.

00:41:21.160 | So a recent example,

00:41:22.780 | one of our executives was really underwater

00:41:26.280 | on selling a house, doing taxes,

00:41:30.680 | like keeping up with all of these things

00:41:33.120 | in their personal life.

00:41:34.280 | That was just, it was really a lot

00:41:37.400 | in addition to all of their work responsibilities.

00:41:39.960 | We made it super clear,

00:41:40.920 | you can absolutely use your EA to help you

00:41:43.540 | do those things and really lowered that cognitive load

00:41:47.720 | of managing those things.

00:41:49.360 | But there is a line and it's fuzzy.

00:41:51.660 | It's admittedly a fuzzy line.

00:41:53.400 | A really obvious crossing that line

00:41:56.540 | is you use your work EA to run your side business

00:42:00.960 | to that is revenue generating

00:42:03.200 | or has some personal benefit

00:42:04.880 | that is unrelated to the business.

00:42:07.400 | You can always rationalize these things.

00:42:09.120 | So like, well, if I didn't have my EA doing it,

00:42:11.720 | then I would be working on that

00:42:13.280 | instead of doing level stuff.

00:42:15.460 | But if you're making money on a product

00:42:18.660 | and you have costs of labor associated with that,

00:42:21.920 | levels should not be paying for it.

00:42:23.160 | You should just have your own team doing that.

00:42:25.520 | Everything in the middle is a little bit fuzzy

00:42:27.560 | and you just kind of have to use your judgment

00:42:29.560 | of is doing this thing,

00:42:32.080 | is this in the best interest of the company?

00:42:34.160 | Is it the case that you delegating

00:42:35.680 | this part of your personal life to an EA?

00:42:38.300 | Is that going to benefit the company?

00:42:40.060 | Are we going to have better output from you because of that?

00:42:43.240 | And if the answer is yes, do it.

00:42:44.600 | If not, don't do it.

00:42:46.040 | If you ever have questions,

00:42:46.880 | you can always just ask somebody.

00:42:48.740 | It's good to socialize these things.

00:42:50.440 | Like if you think it's reasonable

00:42:53.200 | and you ask somebody and they recoil,

00:42:56.520 | it's probably a bad sign

00:42:57.760 | and you probably shouldn't do that.

00:42:59.180 | But yeah, just asking around

00:43:01.040 | is usually a good way of getting feedback

00:43:03.360 | on whether it's appropriate or not.

00:43:05.160 | - And if you're someone who's working on your own

00:43:07.400 | or just hiring an EA to help you,

00:43:10.560 | then it doesn't matter.

00:43:11.400 | - It doesn't matter at all.

00:43:12.600 | - I'm not actually sure how companies would feel

00:43:15.320 | that don't provide EAs to someone hiring their own EA

00:43:18.720 | to help scale them at work.

00:43:20.520 | I'm going to throw that into the ether

00:43:22.400 | unless you have opinions,

00:43:23.320 | but on the personal side,

00:43:25.860 | I've talked to a lot of people about our experience,

00:43:29.920 | many of whom are a little bit later,

00:43:31.240 | have some kids, both adults working,

00:43:34.000 | and the value of just having an EA

00:43:35.760 | for completely non-work stuff

00:43:37.920 | is enough to have someone full-time.

00:43:40.240 | And for costs, for people who are just like,

00:43:42.720 | "Wait, wait, wait, how much is this?"

00:43:44.080 | I would say,

00:43:45.520 | I have not heard of anyone finding an EA directly

00:43:49.320 | on their own, fully loaded for less than $1,000 a month.

00:43:54.160 | And maybe there's some edge cases.

00:43:55.800 | I have not heard of anyone spending

00:43:57.440 | more than four or $5,000 a month for someone remote.

00:44:02.120 | And then in person, you could spend $10,000, $15,000.

00:44:05.800 | So just for people who have some rough sense of that,

00:44:08.440 | I would say for somewhere in the order of,

00:44:10.960 | let's call it 20 to $40,000 a year,

00:44:13.840 | you could probably find a very talented person

00:44:16.280 | somewhere outside of the United States

00:44:18.600 | to give you a lot of leverage.

00:44:20.040 | And in our personal life,

00:44:22.600 | there are just so many examples of things

00:44:25.320 | that I think always sit on that kind of mental burden.

00:44:30.320 | So it's like, "Oh, we're gonna go on a trip."

00:44:32.600 | As soon as you book a trip, there's like a checklist.

00:44:34.920 | You'll learn this.

00:44:35.760 | It's like, "Okay, well now we have to notify the dog walker

00:44:38.200 | that the dog needs to go somewhere.

00:44:39.960 | Now we need to notify the school

00:44:41.240 | that a kid's not gonna be there.

00:44:42.320 | And we need to notify the swimming class

00:44:44.160 | that that's not gonna happen.

00:44:45.200 | And we need to make sure,

00:44:46.840 | just double check that our passports haven't expired

00:44:49.560 | or are going to expire within six months."

00:44:51.840 | Because if anyone doesn't know,

00:44:53.680 | there are a lot of countries

00:44:54.520 | that even if your passport is valid,

00:44:55.880 | won't let you in unless it's six months out.

00:44:57.680 | And so you could almost create this checklist

00:44:59.360 | of every time we book a trip and then be like,

00:45:01.280 | "Well, this is what we need to do."

00:45:02.800 | Or it seems like something crazy

00:45:05.280 | to have someone overseas do,

00:45:07.160 | but research five healthy meals

00:45:09.520 | and order the ingredients for them

00:45:11.240 | on Instacart or Amazon Fresh

00:45:13.320 | and put the recipes in an app

00:45:15.320 | so that we can see them as a meal plan and cook them.

00:45:18.000 | Like that is a thing someone anywhere in the world can do.

00:45:21.240 | And the worst case is you might get a meal

00:45:23.800 | that's not the exact thing you would have picked yourself,

00:45:26.520 | but you spent no time planning it.

00:45:28.640 | That was one where we started doing it.

00:45:30.080 | And then we experimented with a meal kit company

00:45:32.880 | called Green Chef.

00:45:33.720 | And it's just been like, "Oh, this is great."

00:45:35.840 | Sometimes we forget to pick the meals and we're like,

00:45:37.720 | "Oh, we didn't pick it,

00:45:38.800 | but we didn't have to think about it."

00:45:40.240 | And so in our personal lives,

00:45:42.080 | there've just been like these countless research this,

00:45:45.000 | help figure this out, help plan this,

00:45:47.240 | find someone to stain the patio furniture,

00:45:49.600 | call Delta because our flight was five hours late.

00:45:52.640 | And I know that we need to get some compensation for this,

00:45:55.800 | or we need to change this thing.

00:45:58.080 | All of those have made it tremendously valuable.

00:46:01.720 | I did an episode with Dan Martell

00:46:03.760 | who wrote this book called "Buy Back Your Time."

00:46:05.760 | And he has a house manager,

00:46:06.800 | much like your friend would need.

00:46:08.640 | - I'm gonna write it down.

00:46:09.760 | - It's focused a little bit more on business than personal,

00:46:12.360 | but he is a expert delegator,

00:46:15.360 | which I have a couple of questions about things he does

00:46:17.600 | if your experience there matches.

00:46:20.080 | But he has someone doing all these things.

00:46:22.080 | He wants someone to go pick up dry cleaning.

00:46:23.440 | Obviously, that's something you'd need someone local,

00:46:25.240 | but it just opened my mind to the fact that

00:46:28.120 | even if you don't have enough work or side hustle projects,

00:46:31.480 | you might have enough personal projects.

00:46:33.640 | And the freeing up of your personal time

00:46:37.440 | might unlock you to start that side hustle project,

00:46:40.000 | to start that business,

00:46:41.160 | to just spend more time with your kids.

00:46:43.520 | Like there are things that might be not revenue generating,

00:46:46.720 | but life fulfilling that all could make this super valuable,

00:46:50.560 | even if it has nothing to do with work.

00:46:52.640 | And so in our case, it spreads the line of both,

00:46:56.640 | but almost has shown so productive,

00:46:58.880 | like, "Well, maybe we need to, maybe we want to,

00:47:00.440 | "and then how would we split them and how would we do that?"

00:47:02.040 | That's a whole other topic, but I don't know.

00:47:04.840 | It's seeing what it could unlock

00:47:06.600 | for someone outside of work is powerful.

00:47:09.520 | - And it's funny, the idea of, say,

00:47:12.160 | getting an EA to help you with work stuff,

00:47:14.240 | even if your work isn't paying for it,

00:47:15.960 | if it's $20,000 a year

00:47:17.640 | and you have a really meaningful salary,

00:47:20.200 | it could accelerate you quite a lot

00:47:22.280 | in terms of your productivity,

00:47:23.600 | and you'd really stand out in terms of where your peers are

00:47:26.760 | 'cause you get so much more done.

00:47:28.520 | But it does remind me of something from The Onion

00:47:31.520 | several years ago where there's a guy

00:47:33.920 | who had basically done exactly this

00:47:35.920 | and he outsourced his job to somebody in Minnesota.

00:47:40.160 | Then they interviewed that person

00:47:41.240 | and he had outsourced it to somebody in the Philippines,

00:47:43.440 | and that person had outsourced it to somebody in Pakistan.

00:47:46.800 | The conclusion was 60% of the world's tasks

00:47:49.360 | are delegated to one guy in Pakistan.

00:47:51.160 | (both laughing)

00:47:52.720 | You can definitely get a lot of leverage out of it,

00:47:55.200 | for sure.

00:47:56.040 | - Yeah, I would say, depending on the type of tasks,

00:47:58.440 | I would highly encourage someone

00:47:59.760 | to vet this with their employer

00:48:01.640 | before handing over their company's credentials

00:48:04.440 | or anything like that.

00:48:05.280 | - Most companies would not be cool with that.

00:48:06.600 | - Yes, but I could see a world where if you were in sales,

00:48:10.160 | which, as you mentioned earlier, you wouldn't be,

00:48:12.280 | it could be a place where you could say,

00:48:13.440 | "Hey, could I hire someone on my own dime

00:48:15.920 | "to help me source leads, to help me cold call,"

00:48:18.520 | that kind of stuff.

00:48:19.360 | Maybe you get the company to do it, but if not,

00:48:21.520 | I could see, especially for people on commission,

00:48:23.880 | with the approval of their employer,

00:48:25.520 | it could very seriously pay for itself quickly.

00:48:29.080 | But we just talked about credentials.

00:48:30.400 | You talked about an EA helping with taxes.

00:48:32.880 | One of the things that I think a lot of people are hesitant

00:48:35.680 | with hiring someone they don't know overseas

00:48:37.760 | is how much do you give access to?

00:48:41.200 | You're giving access to your email,

00:48:43.240 | or your logins, or your bank account,

00:48:46.480 | or in the case of my friend Dan,

00:48:49.400 | he actually has his EA on his iMessage,

00:48:52.200 | so all of his text messages, everything.

00:48:55.480 | How do you think about that kind of access,

00:48:58.160 | control, and trust?

00:48:59.960 | - You wanna have as few people with access

00:49:02.640 | as is necessary to do whatever tasks

00:49:05.680 | you wanna do effectively.

00:49:06.920 | It is a security vulnerability.

00:49:08.680 | Any person who has access to it is a security risk,

00:49:12.600 | and so you have to be very mindful of that.

00:49:14.960 | You want it to be as few people as humanly possible.

00:49:18.240 | What you give them access to,

00:49:19.960 | it's really gonna be a matter of your own personal risk.

00:49:22.640 | And some of this also comes down to,

00:49:24.800 | there's a lot more recourse when you have, say, an agency,

00:49:28.000 | they vet people.

00:49:29.240 | Somebody from one of the agencies we've talked about,

00:49:31.760 | it's unlikely that that person is going to copy

00:49:35.200 | all of your information and dox you.

00:49:37.520 | But if it's just some random internet troll

00:49:40.000 | that you don't realize that you've hired,

00:49:42.040 | you're not gonna be able to find this person.

00:49:43.640 | You have no recourse if they do something

00:49:45.640 | that's inappropriate.

00:49:47.000 | So that's one of the other risks you have to manage.

00:49:50.840 | I don't have a car.

00:49:52.160 | I generally just take Uber.

00:49:53.440 | I think people often underappreciate

00:49:55.400 | how much liability you take on just from driving.

00:49:58.160 | It's a very real thing,

00:49:59.320 | and you don't have that liability when you're in an Uber.

00:50:02.200 | And so pricing in, liability risk, insurance risk,

00:50:05.640 | the cost of the car, depreciation, gasoline,

00:50:08.760 | Uber's not as expensive as people think it is.

00:50:11.400 | When you calculate all these different forms of exposure

00:50:14.520 | that you have, it's very real.

00:50:15.840 | So personally, I do give access to a lot of these things,

00:50:19.400 | and I give it to as few people as necessary

00:50:21.680 | to be able to get a task done effectively.

00:50:23.680 | And I know people who are loathe to give access

00:50:27.320 | to basically anything for exactly the same reason.

00:50:29.920 | It's just, it's too risky.

00:50:31.920 | - I will say a few things I've picked up in giving access.

00:50:35.400 | So I think most people listening

00:50:36.800 | will have a password manager.

00:50:38.240 | And so, you know, that's one way to share access

00:50:41.200 | to things.

00:50:42.040 | You could potentially give someone access to an account,

00:50:44.760 | but not give them access to the two-factor code.

00:50:47.600 | So you know when they're logging in, that's something.

00:50:50.640 | I separate email addresses for banking

00:50:54.560 | and things where someone could spend money,

00:50:56.880 | or in my case, points.

00:50:58.520 | Like, let's leave that separate.

00:51:00.160 | And so that's one way that I've said,

00:51:02.400 | okay, you can have access to my email,

00:51:03.800 | but if you needed to, I don't know, send a wire transfer,

00:51:07.000 | the confirmation is not gonna come through there.

00:51:09.240 | I know plenty of people that I've talked to

00:51:12.080 | separate their phones,

00:51:13.160 | so they have two factors coming into one number,

00:51:15.320 | and they have regular things coming to another.

00:51:16.920 | So you could potentially give someone access

00:51:18.760 | to your text messages without giving them access

00:51:21.560 | to some of the controls they would need.

00:51:24.320 | Also, there are a lot of financial institutions

00:51:27.160 | that actually have access controls.

00:51:29.320 | So like, I think in Chase,

00:51:30.840 | there are probably plenty of people

00:51:32.080 | who have bad experience with Chase.

00:51:32.920 | You could actually say like, oh, can I add a person?

00:51:34.720 | Can I delegate information and give them only these rules?

00:51:38.160 | Most business accounts already have this built in,

00:51:40.320 | but a lot of personal accounts don't.

00:51:42.120 | But when you can find one that does, that can be helpful.

00:51:44.880 | And a lot of times, you can ask.

00:51:47.120 | I remember someone I know just asked

00:51:48.560 | if they could have a Wells Fargo business account,

00:51:50.960 | but for themselves,

00:51:52.320 | because it had all these rules and these tools,

00:51:54.240 | but it was like a much worse login, terrible app,

00:51:56.760 | but they could set up these kind of procedures.

00:51:58.720 | So that's some of the things I've thought about.

00:52:01.480 | You know, with credit cards, I hear someone,

00:52:02.800 | oh, they could spend all my money.

00:52:03.720 | It's like, well, you also have liability

00:52:05.560 | and fraud protection.

00:52:06.680 | You can add an authorized user and set a credit limit.

00:52:09.280 | So I think there are ways to mitigate some of these things,

00:52:12.200 | but also every time you get on the highway,

00:52:14.560 | there is some risk that something like,

00:52:16.520 | I also have to weigh the risks of being able to have a life

00:52:19.840 | where I'm spending time doing what I want.

00:52:21.720 | And sometimes that risk is just worth it.

00:52:23.680 | - It's a risk calculation.

00:52:25.040 | People in general have a very hard time assessing risk

00:52:28.560 | because status quo bias is so strong.

00:52:31.200 | Whatever you're used to doing,

00:52:32.840 | and you've never experienced some catastrophically

00:52:35.560 | bad outcome from normal day to,

00:52:37.760 | people really underestimate how dangerous driving is.

00:52:40.800 | It's super dangerous, but we do it all the time.

00:52:43.600 | And when you think about it in the abstract sense of like,

00:52:45.480 | yeah, we're just going to be whizzing by

00:52:48.160 | these multi-ton vehicles going at 70 miles an hour

00:52:52.360 | past each other with like people with very little experience

00:52:55.760 | driving while texting, you would say that should be illegal.

00:52:59.720 | There's no way that that is allowed.

00:53:02.400 | And that's what we do all the time.

00:53:03.960 | It's remarkable that it is as safe as it is.

00:53:06.480 | And so every day you're making risk calculations.

00:53:09.720 | You probably didn't check this morning

00:53:11.480 | whether somebody cut your brakes.

00:53:13.320 | If that did, that would probably be really bad,

00:53:15.560 | but you probably didn't check that.

00:53:17.080 | But if you did, it would decrease your risk

00:53:19.080 | that your brakes don't work.

00:53:20.640 | Did you check that all of these other aspects of your car

00:53:23.200 | are functioning normally every day?

00:53:24.920 | Probably not.

00:53:26.160 | And that's okay.

00:53:27.000 | That's a risk that you take,

00:53:28.080 | and it's probably a reasonable one.

00:53:29.760 | And so whatever that threshold is going to be for you,

00:53:32.280 | you just have to figure out what you're comfortable with

00:53:34.120 | and go with that.

00:53:35.720 | - But I will say, even if you don't give up

00:53:39.080 | managing your finances to an assistant,

00:53:41.760 | there are still a lot of things that you could do

00:53:43.480 | to unlock stuff.

00:53:44.720 | And for some inspiration, I actually,

00:53:46.680 | Athena has these playbooks

00:53:48.600 | that I thought are really interesting on their website.

00:53:50.440 | I'll link to them in the show notes

00:53:51.480 | where it's just like ideas of things an EA could do.

00:53:54.280 | On the personal side, I have a friend who,

00:53:57.000 | you know, uses it to be a better gift giver.

00:53:59.240 | He's like, I want to track people's birthdays

00:54:01.160 | and I want to give better gifts.

00:54:02.520 | And I want to make sure I'm more thoughtful

00:54:04.320 | sporadically and spontaneously.

00:54:05.800 | It's like, it unlocks not just things that they are doing

00:54:09.680 | that they don't want to do,

00:54:10.560 | but it unlocks things that they wish they could do

00:54:12.360 | and can't do now.

00:54:13.200 | I don't know if there's things in your life

00:54:14.440 | where you've been able to do more

00:54:16.400 | that you never were doing before because of it.

00:54:18.560 | - Yeah, for sure.

00:54:19.480 | It's less that they are things that I can't do myself.

00:54:23.000 | It's more, I would not have been able to prioritize it

00:54:26.080 | because I would not have had capacity.

00:54:27.360 | Like the magic card example that I gave.

00:54:30.000 | There was no universe where I could justify

00:54:32.360 | spending three days of dedicated time

00:54:35.520 | to making custom magic cards for everyone on the team.

00:54:38.720 | It just makes no sense.

00:54:40.120 | But I could justify 15 minutes on the instructions for it.

00:54:44.400 | And the team really liked them.

00:54:46.360 | And so there's a lot of those sorts of things

00:54:48.200 | where I can't justify doing these things consistently.

00:54:51.680 | Like another one, oftentimes when a friend has a baby,

00:54:55.000 | I'll send them flowers, which is like a nice gesture.

00:54:58.040 | And can I justify myself or all of my friends

00:55:02.720 | figuring out what their address is,

00:55:04.880 | what the local florist is,

00:55:06.880 | what kind of flowers we should get?

00:55:09.120 | I would probably have to spend 100 hours a year

00:55:12.160 | on this task.

00:55:13.160 | And it's just, I can't justify that.

00:55:15.800 | But if I can lower that threshold to 30 minutes a year,

00:55:20.720 | yeah, totally worth doing.

00:55:22.480 | So that's what I mean when I talk about getting leverage

00:55:25.560 | is that you're able to get leverage

00:55:27.360 | and you're able to do a lot more of the kinds of things

00:55:29.840 | that you really like to do,

00:55:31.280 | but it's just hard to justify relative to other priorities.

00:55:34.360 | - Let's go a little deeper on how you onboard people

00:55:37.120 | to these things.

00:55:37.960 | So you say 30 minutes, 15 minutes here,

00:55:39.240 | you gave the example earlier in how you could spend time

00:55:43.080 | delegating the magic, the gathering task.

00:55:45.280 | What things do you do, tools do you use

00:55:48.000 | to make onboarding an EA or anyone that's helping you

00:55:51.640 | on your team for that matter, more effective at doing them?

00:55:54.600 | - So the biggest tool is Loom,

00:55:56.960 | which is a screen recording tool.

00:55:59.520 | And it allows you to capture what it is

00:56:03.160 | that is on your screen.

00:56:04.160 | It allows you to capture it on content as well.

00:56:08.120 | This is one of the struggles of where people delegate

00:56:11.600 | in a more traditional sense, which is you have a phone call

00:56:14.280 | or you do it on a Zoom call,

00:56:16.160 | and then they're taking notes furiously

00:56:18.560 | while you're explaining the tasks to them.

00:56:20.800 | And as soon as you end the call,

00:56:21.880 | they have forgotten what it is that you told them.

00:56:24.460 | The nice thing about Loom is you can record it async

00:56:27.760 | on your own time, you can send it to them,

00:56:30.120 | they can watch it at 2X, they can watch it again,

00:56:33.280 | they can pause it, they can take notes,

00:56:35.940 | they can come back to it a week later,

00:56:37.920 | and they can refresh on what the task was.

00:56:39.960 | So solving this in content is really the best way

00:56:43.320 | to go about it.

00:56:44.400 | Other tools, I would say Voice Notes is a really good tool.

00:56:48.360 | I often use Signal, they have a good Voice Note tool.

00:56:51.240 | The Athena app actually is pretty good.

00:56:53.040 | Have you seen that one at all?

00:56:54.440 | - I have not.

00:56:55.620 | - It's pretty cool.

00:56:56.660 | You don't even need to use Athena for it.

00:56:58.700 | My brother actually uses it for an unrelated use case,

00:57:01.380 | but it's a cool thing where you open it up

00:57:04.220 | and then it immediately starts recording a Voice Note.

00:57:07.380 | And you set it up where once you finish recording

00:57:10.180 | the Voice Note, it emails it to whoever you specify.

00:57:13.060 | And so if you have an EA, if it's people that you know,

00:57:17.220 | however you wanna delegate these things,

00:57:19.260 | you just record a Voice Note and then you press Done,

00:57:21.540 | and then it just sends it to that email address.

00:57:23.380 | It's a very, very simple tool.

00:57:24.960 | - I've heard Whisper Notes or Whisper Memos

00:57:27.780 | is another very good tool for that same use case,

00:57:31.480 | but layering in transcription and a little bit of AI.

00:57:34.680 | I haven't used it, but I know a few people

00:57:37.000 | that swear by it as the tool for that purpose.

00:57:39.260 | - Yeah, totally.

00:57:40.100 | There's a few similar tools like that.

00:57:42.160 | Voice Notes are really helpful because the friction

00:57:46.860 | of pulling out your phone, writing it out with your thumbs,

00:57:51.100 | I have just found is usually too high

00:57:53.820 | to get the task out of my head.

00:57:56.760 | And by the time I've opened my phone,

00:57:59.260 | I've opened up my email and I've started typing,

00:58:01.700 | I've already forgotten what it is I wanted to delegate.

00:58:04.500 | If I can just open up my phone and say,

00:58:05.980 | "Hey, remember to send that thing to that person."

00:58:10.780 | Or, "Hey, I just had a meeting with this person.

00:58:13.700 | Please make sure to follow up with these three people

00:58:16.840 | so that they know that that meeting happened

00:58:18.620 | and this was the outcome."

00:58:20.020 | And then I'm done.

00:58:20.860 | I'm convinced that the thoughts that we have are ephemeral.

00:58:24.900 | When you write out your ideas,

00:58:27.620 | that is the externalization of those thoughts.

00:58:29.780 | And those thoughts have now left your brain.

00:58:31.700 | They're now in this artifact.

00:58:33.860 | And so the sooner you can get in these fleeting moments

00:58:37.300 | of inspiration, the faster you can get them out of your head

00:58:40.260 | and into some artifact that can be action, the better.

00:58:43.220 | - One other tool that has been really interesting

00:58:45.860 | to play with, I don't know if you've used

00:58:48.060 | the ChatGPT app with voice.

00:58:51.260 | - No, I haven't.

00:58:52.100 | - So you can open up the ChatGPT app now

00:58:54.020 | and you can say, "Hey, I'm trying to prep an interview guide

00:58:58.340 | about delegation."

00:58:59.980 | And it feels like a conversation where the other person

00:59:03.180 | is lagging behind you three seconds 'cause it has to think.

00:59:06.140 | But I experimented with actually prepping an interview

00:59:09.340 | in a voice conversation.

00:59:10.860 | And my only criticism is that you have to instruct it

00:59:14.580 | not to give you too much feedback until the end maybe,

00:59:19.380 | because they might say, "Oh, here's the guide again,"

00:59:21.660 | and read through it all and then read through it all.

00:59:23.660 | But it synchronizes everything with the GPT website and app.

00:59:27.340 | So you go get the text of it later,

00:59:29.420 | but you can actually have a conversation.

00:59:31.180 | And I wish I knew the name for whatever, I don't know,

00:59:34.340 | phenomenon, psychological principle, something is,

00:59:36.980 | but it is sometimes much easier for many people

00:59:40.220 | to get something out in a conversation than writing.

00:59:43.460 | Not just the friction and the time,

00:59:45.180 | but you actually sometimes get a higher quality product.

00:59:47.940 | And so I find that when I'm trying to struggle

00:59:50.540 | to think about things, my wife and I all brainstorm

00:59:52.820 | an idea together and I'm like, "Wow, I got a lot more

00:59:54.620 | out of that."

00:59:55.460 | And sometimes she's like, "I didn't even say anything.

00:59:56.780 | I just sat here and you talking to me,"

00:59:59.020 | similar to kind of rubber duck debugging.

01:00:01.500 | It's like just having a person to talk to

01:00:03.260 | and audibly bring it out loud can generate something.

01:00:06.500 | And so yes, you can record yourself,

01:00:08.860 | but I encourage people to check out GPT Voice

01:00:11.660 | 'cause you can have that conversation

01:00:12.940 | and get feedback.

01:00:13.780 | You can do it in your AirPods.

01:00:14.660 | It's almost like a little AI assistant

01:00:17.260 | that you have to trigger with the app.

01:00:18.660 | - Cool, yeah, I have it on my phone.

01:00:20.300 | I just haven't used that.

01:00:21.180 | I'll check that out.

01:00:22.220 | - You definitely said Loom was important,

01:00:23.580 | but I wanna make sure we give it a little bit more emphasis

01:00:25.660 | 'cause I've started using it for almost everything.

01:00:28.340 | And it basically, anytime I'm doing a task,

01:00:31.780 | I just record it, at least the first time.

01:00:33.860 | And so even if I'm not sure I wanna delegate it,

01:00:36.740 | I'll be like, "Oh, I'm gonna go set up a new invoice.

01:00:39.700 | Let me just record it and I'll go put it in a repository

01:00:42.380 | of all the things I do.

01:00:43.780 | Oh, I'm gonna book a flight.

01:00:44.860 | Let's record how I search for flights."

01:00:46.900 | I don't like to delegate my travel.

01:00:48.160 | I think you don't either, but at least there is a video.

01:00:50.660 | If I ever wanted to tell someone how I book a flight,

01:00:52.580 | I can walk them through the process

01:00:54.100 | of how I think about it.

01:00:55.340 | There's no cost.

01:00:56.260 | As a early Loom user, I assumed every video

01:00:58.860 | had to have me talking with the video and the audio.

01:01:01.860 | You can just make a video of you just working.

01:01:03.940 | A part of me is like, "Should I just record my whole day?"

01:01:05.780 | So that I could, you know, there's an app called Rewind

01:01:08.000 | that records your screen all day,

01:01:10.180 | records your audio all day,

01:01:11.620 | and you can actually go back and search through it.

01:01:13.660 | And it's super interesting for cases of like,

01:01:16.100 | "Oh, I was doing this thing.

01:01:17.380 | What was it?"

01:01:18.200 | And it OCRs everything so you can go search.

01:01:20.540 | Not the same use case.

01:01:22.140 | And I don't think it's as easy to go back and clip a thing,

01:01:24.340 | but it's kind of this idea of like always on.

01:01:26.680 | So I would just encourage everyone,

01:01:27.840 | if you haven't used Loom and you have any tasks

01:01:30.740 | you wanna share to use it,

01:01:32.620 | but also I use it to push back on synchronous meetings.

01:01:37.620 | And I wanna take a little tangent here

01:01:39.060 | 'cause you've thought about this deeply.

01:01:41.460 | I don't think, and I know you don't either,

01:01:43.940 | that having a synchronous meeting,

01:01:46.340 | and for anyone who's unfamiliar,

01:01:47.180 | just like both people are in the meeting at the same time,

01:01:49.460 | whether it's a phone call or a video,

01:01:51.060 | is really necessary all the time.

01:01:52.900 | - I think it's unnecessary most of the time, yeah.

01:01:55.900 | There are definitely use cases where it's really valuable

01:01:58.380 | and it is the best.

01:01:59.220 | Like we can't do this podcast asynchronously.

01:02:01.540 | It wouldn't make any sense.

01:02:03.040 | But some of the things that I found that are really useful

01:02:05.660 | is when somebody sends a meeting request,

01:02:08.580 | I will often send them a Loom in response and say,

01:02:11.940 | "Yeah, here's the answers to your questions."

01:02:14.060 | And it might take four minutes.

01:02:16.060 | And they say, "Oh, okay, great.

01:02:18.100 | "Thank you."

01:02:18.940 | It took me four minutes.

01:02:20.060 | They probably watched it at 2X.

01:02:21.820 | That whole cycle took six minutes

01:02:24.620 | as opposed to some scheduled time in the future,

01:02:27.540 | 30 minutes of each of our time,

01:02:29.780 | where we may not have even delivered

01:02:31.580 | on what we wanted to anyway.

01:02:33.100 | So you can skip all the small talk of the conversation

01:02:37.620 | and you can just get straight to the point.

01:02:39.180 | So proactively sending Looms,

01:02:41.820 | I have found has reduced the number of meetings

01:02:43.980 | that I need to take by, I don't know, 80%.

01:02:46.640 | Just 'cause a lot of times you just don't need

01:02:48.940 | to have a call to get basic information

01:02:51.020 | that people are asking for.

01:02:52.260 | - And the precursor to that sometimes for me

01:02:53.860 | is clarifying that there's actually a purpose.

01:02:56.180 | I get a message from someone, it's like,

01:02:57.260 | "Oh, we're in this WhatsApp group together.

01:03:00.980 | "Would love to connect."

01:03:02.740 | And I might write back and say,

01:03:04.640 | "Hey, the next two months are crazy.

01:03:06.400 | "Like right now I'm on a mission to get 12 episodes ahead

01:03:09.380 | "just so that it feels like there could be a break.

01:03:12.880 | "So the next two months are crazy."

01:03:14.620 | If there's something you actually want to discuss,

01:03:16.860 | feel free to send it over.

01:03:17.860 | I'm happy to record a response

01:03:19.540 | or feel free to use Loom and make a Loom

01:03:21.100 | and we can have a conversation.

01:03:22.780 | Especially with kids, there's a lot of times

01:03:24.660 | where they're asleep, I'm trying to be quiet.

01:03:26.900 | It's midnight, but I could be responsive.

01:03:30.120 | And I find that does two things.

01:03:32.660 | Two things positive and one thing negative.

01:03:34.520 | Sometimes there are interesting conversations

01:03:36.540 | that probably wouldn't happen

01:03:37.800 | because the other person didn't really have an agenda

01:03:39.820 | but wanted to just connect.

01:03:41.500 | Many times that would have been a waste of time.

01:03:43.180 | Sometimes it's not, and we should talk about that.

01:03:45.740 | But I do think that oftentimes it reduces meetings

01:03:50.740 | that are not necessary.

01:03:52.020 | Like someone we just didn't need to meet.

01:03:54.160 | It raises the burden for someone

01:03:56.340 | to actually have a conversation,

01:03:58.580 | but not in a way that says no.

01:04:00.900 | So if I get an email, it's like, "I'm too busy to meet."

01:04:03.500 | It's like, "Oh, that kind of feels bad."

01:04:05.880 | But it's like, "I'm too busy to meet synchronously."

01:04:08.300 | But if you want to record a video, I will get back to you.

01:04:10.780 | So it just kind of makes the whole process easier.

01:04:13.380 | I don't know, for me.

01:04:14.220 | But I do hate that sometimes I'm missing out.

01:04:17.380 | - What I have found is that connecting on Zoom

01:04:20.220 | is soul crushing.

01:04:21.980 | And so I don't do it, generally speaking.

01:04:25.660 | If somebody says like,

01:04:26.780 | "Hey, do you want to jump on a 30 minute call?"

01:04:29.140 | The answer is almost always going to be no,

01:04:31.700 | unless there's a specific agenda of what we will discuss.

01:04:34.900 | I have a much lower bar

01:04:36.300 | for meeting somebody for coffee in person.

01:04:39.060 | Because even if there isn't a clear agenda,

01:04:43.380 | it's much more energizing to just be in person

01:04:47.140 | and talking to people.

01:04:48.920 | Part of this is also I utterly lack discipline

01:04:52.180 | and the ability to wake up at a reasonable hour.

01:04:55.660 | And so I often will schedule 8 a.m. coffees

01:04:59.120 | just to force myself to wake up at 7.30.

01:05:02.220 | Because otherwise I'll wake up at 10 or 11.

01:05:04.780 | And so that's a really helpful strategy

01:05:06.940 | to just get me out of bed in the morning.

01:05:08.740 | - Having children will also help.

01:05:09.900 | - Yeah, for sure.

01:05:11.380 | Yeah, my friends who have kids,

01:05:12.420 | they seem to wake up at four or five in the morning now.

01:05:14.740 | One interesting thing is that I now delegate

01:05:17.480 | a lot more of my travel than I did before.

01:05:20.260 | It used to be the case that there was too much nuance

01:05:23.540 | in my travel schedule that I've tried delegating

01:05:27.780 | and I didn't have much luck.

01:05:29.520 | But now that none of the airlines

01:05:31.900 | have cancellation and change fees,

01:05:34.260 | it is a much lower burden

01:05:36.340 | to effectively semi-automate the process.

01:05:40.300 | My entire travel schedule is fixed three months in advance,

01:05:44.480 | generally speaking.

01:05:45.900 | And so my EAs will see my travel schedule

01:05:48.400 | and they will proactively book flights.

01:05:51.180 | But they don't necessarily need to be the flights

01:05:54.420 | that I will take.

01:05:55.460 | So I can see three months out or two months out,

01:05:59.140 | oh, they booked the wrong flight

01:06:00.760 | and then I could just change it.

01:06:01.940 | It's not a big deal.

01:06:03.000 | But at this point, 80% of the time,

01:06:05.460 | it's the correct flight

01:06:06.620 | and it's not a huge burden to change it.

01:06:09.020 | So I would say that I have semi-automated my travel

01:06:13.000 | because they can see my schedule,

01:06:14.820 | they can book the flights proactively

01:06:16.540 | and then I can just change it as necessary.

01:06:18.340 | So I found that to be very helpful.

01:06:20.100 | - I know Sam and I have covered so much

01:06:23.460 | on the topic of assistance,

01:06:24.760 | but I've gotten so much value in my work

01:06:26.900 | and even my life from just having an amazing EA.

01:06:30.180 | Thank you, Pasini, if you're listening, you are awesome.

01:06:33.100 | And I really hope that any of you

01:06:34.780 | who end up hiring one yourself

01:06:36.380 | have an amazing experience too.

01:06:38.740 | As I mentioned, I found my EA

01:06:40.580 | through a company called Oceans

01:06:42.140 | and not only have they been awesome to work with

01:06:44.460 | on that front,

01:06:45.580 | they also spent a bunch of time with me the last few weeks

01:06:49.100 | to help me put together a very comprehensive 13-page guide

01:06:53.260 | that lays out 10 tactical steps you need to take

01:06:56.320 | before, during and after hiring your assistant

01:06:59.440 | to really create a paradigm shift in the way you work.

01:07:02.320 | It includes so much of what I've learned this year,

01:07:05.080 | some anecdotes and some tips,

01:07:06.780 | as well as everything they've learned

01:07:08.480 | running a business in the space for the past few years too.

01:07:11.880 | It's totally free, so if you wanna give it a read,

01:07:14.600 | just go to allthehacks.com/delegate

01:07:17.960 | or find the link in the show notes.

01:07:20.160 | And if you wanna find yourself an amazing EA with Oceans,

01:07:23.120 | you can head on over to oceansxyz.com.

01:07:26.880 | And big thank you to Ian, their CEO,

01:07:29.320 | for offering anyone who signs up

01:07:31.200 | and mentions All the Hacks $1,000 off their first month.

01:07:34.760 | Definitely check both of those out.

01:07:36.520 | It seems like with every business,

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01:07:45.980 | and you have too many manual processes

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01:09:04.440 | I think if you apply the Pareto principle,

01:09:06.880 | like the 80/20 to a lot of things,

01:09:09.320 | especially in the world of optimization,

01:09:12.400 | I've found that you get to separate the decision

01:09:15.420 | from the optimal outcome and unopt outcome.

01:09:18.500 | So it's like, well, the example I've used a lot is

01:09:21.640 | I had an insurance policy for our home,

01:09:23.640 | and then we realized the home had appreciated.

01:09:25.440 | It was like, we need more coverage.

01:09:28.040 | I also would like to have the cheapest policy.

01:09:30.360 | And so I mixed those two things together and said,

01:09:33.880 | well, let's go find the best policy.

01:09:35.740 | Now, this happened again later in life,

01:09:38.000 | and it was like, let's get a policy that covers the house

01:09:40.560 | at the right amount.

01:09:41.720 | And then I can decide whether I want to go through

01:09:43.560 | the process of optimizing to save a little bit more.

01:09:45.960 | So in your case, it's like, let's book a flight.

01:09:48.200 | And then I can decide if it's worth trying to drill in

01:09:50.520 | and find the best thing or just take the one that's booked.

01:09:53.240 | And so I've tried to get a lot better at,

01:09:56.360 | let's just do the easy 80% of the thing I want,

01:10:00.140 | and then separate the decision to optimize

01:10:02.400 | from the decision to do the first part.

01:10:04.560 | Oftentimes, you can delegate that,

01:10:06.640 | like the hard part that you maybe feel

01:10:08.880 | uncomfortable delegating is that last 20%.

01:10:11.760 | - Yeah, and the reason why I wasn't able to delegate travel

01:10:14.920 | as effectively before is that it used to be the case

01:10:17.600 | that in every airline except Southwest,

01:10:19.800 | if you book a flight, you're like signing a suicide pact.

01:10:23.200 | You cannot cancel this flight or they will charge you $150,

01:10:27.120 | like plus a bunch of other fees.

01:10:29.320 | Now there's no change fees, no cancellation fees,

01:10:31.980 | no anything, and so the risk of booking a wrong flight

01:10:35.320 | is much lower.

01:10:36.360 | - Yeah, it's like you might get some credit.

01:10:37.840 | - Yeah, which I'm gonna use anyway.

01:10:39.720 | - Unless you're booking something obscurely international,

01:10:42.720 | where you probably wanna get it right

01:10:43.880 | because a Kenya Airways credit might not be that useful

01:10:47.480 | to you in the future.

01:10:48.820 | Okay, so when it comes to meetings,

01:10:51.940 | you've talked about using Looms as a way

01:10:54.240 | to reduce the meetings you have,

01:10:56.580 | but I also know that having more relationships,

01:11:00.800 | meeting more people is something you're interested in.

01:11:02.980 | Yes, you can meet them in person,

01:11:04.280 | but how do you think about that entire project

01:11:06.680 | of building relationships, networking?

01:11:09.800 | I know you've said you kind of default

01:11:11.320 | more of an introverted person.

01:11:12.480 | You say you don't wanna be in sales,

01:11:13.500 | you'd rather be an engineer.

01:11:14.780 | How do you think about building your network

01:11:16.760 | and taking meetings that might be a waste of time,

01:11:19.340 | but could turn into really powerful connections?

01:11:22.140 | - It's something that really came from the recognition

01:11:24.720 | that so many of the good things in my life

01:11:28.140 | have just come from people that are around me.

01:11:31.520 | And very rarely is it actually something that I did.

01:11:35.120 | I put more emphasis on being around people

01:11:38.080 | that I care about.

01:11:39.200 | There's a lot of spontaneity in these meetings.

01:11:41.880 | There are often people that I don't know very much about,

01:11:44.720 | and I meet with them.

01:11:45.980 | They're usually friends of friends.

01:11:47.780 | There's a, I forget who has this quote,

01:11:50.320 | but I think it's a really, it's a useful mindset

01:11:53.920 | to come into every conversation,

01:11:56.120 | including every conversation with your Uber driver,

01:11:59.040 | which is, "Every man is my superior in some way."

01:12:02.720 | Some variant of that quote.

01:12:04.600 | It has always surprised me

01:12:07.000 | how there were life experiences from people.

01:12:10.080 | There are ideas that people have

01:12:12.120 | that are really fascinating

01:12:15.320 | and often different than your own worldview.

01:12:18.320 | And so figuring out how to learn from other people

01:12:22.080 | in any context, I think it's just, it's a skill to develop.

01:12:25.360 | And once you get good at it

01:12:27.120 | and you really are excited to talk to people

01:12:29.360 | and learn from them, it's really energizing.

01:12:31.560 | So I appreciate that aspect of meeting new people.

01:12:35.680 | I would say I rarely come in with a specific agenda.

01:12:38.880 | It's like something that I want out of a person,

01:12:41.400 | but it is surprising how often unexpected value

01:12:44.840 | comes from these things.

01:12:46.320 | I would say that I'm convinced

01:12:48.360 | that the universe is conspiring in my favor.

01:12:50.920 | It's just, these things happen in a way

01:12:53.040 | that it just seems much too improbable to be random.

01:12:57.400 | - And you said, once you get good at it,

01:12:59.580 | what does that look like?

01:13:00.520 | You're meeting with a random person you don't know.

01:13:02.440 | What do you do now differently

01:13:03.600 | than you would have done before?

01:13:05.280 | - So I think some of it is you,

01:13:06.960 | who was it that I was talking to?

01:13:08.840 | He had a good way of describing it.

01:13:10.000 | He says he really doesn't like beige conversations.

01:13:12.760 | (laughs)

01:13:13.920 | Which is just like, yeah, weather is good.

01:13:16.160 | Food, I eat food too, food and weather.

01:13:19.240 | And you just kinda, you spend 10 minutes

01:13:21.400 | just sort of talking about beige things.

01:13:25.400 | And the sooner you can get to a point

01:13:28.720 | of asking a more interesting question.

01:13:31.600 | The biggest thing is, I think this was in

01:13:33.440 | How to Win Friends and Influence People,

01:13:35.380 | where he says, it's really important

01:13:37.160 | to remember people's names.

01:13:38.520 | The most important trick to doing that,

01:13:40.960 | to remembering people's names,

01:13:42.120 | is first you have to want to remember their names.

01:13:44.280 | (laughs)

01:13:45.440 | That's the secret, is you actually have to want to do it.

01:13:48.240 | If you don't want to do it, you're not gonna do it.

01:13:50.520 | And so I think that's a big part of it,

01:13:53.240 | is you have to want to find something interesting

01:13:56.680 | in these other people.

01:13:57.700 | If you're just going through the motions,

01:13:59.000 | it's not gonna be fun.

01:14:00.360 | And so if you learn about somebody's background,

01:14:03.440 | where they're from, what they're struggling with,

01:14:06.240 | if they have any regrets in their life,

01:14:08.440 | what they're excited about,

01:14:10.360 | and just the sooner you can get past that initial point

01:14:13.600 | of just sort of a conversation that you could place in

01:14:17.000 | with any random person in the world,

01:14:18.760 | and it would be exactly the same,

01:14:20.520 | the sooner you can really start to get value from those

01:14:23.000 | and find them a lot more energizing.

01:14:25.360 | - I mean, I guess maybe one of the tactics

01:14:26.960 | would be this gratitude exercise you did to find them.

01:14:29.480 | - The gratitude exercise that I did,

01:14:31.400 | this was several years ago now,

01:14:32.900 | I spent some time reflecting.

01:14:35.560 | It was in one of these books that I read,

01:14:37.880 | they recommended doing an exercise like this,

01:14:40.300 | and just writing down all of the good things

01:14:42.960 | that have happened to me in my life.

01:14:45.160 | And well, I think I maybe listed a hundred things.

01:14:48.560 | And what was so interesting when I was reflecting

01:14:50.680 | on this list was how almost all of them

01:14:53.740 | were because of people in my life

01:14:55.600 | and not because of something that I did.

01:14:57.720 | And that was a real wake-up call to realize

01:15:00.840 | that a lot of these great things and the people

01:15:04.120 | that were impactful on my life

01:15:06.000 | in both personal and professional things,

01:15:08.120 | they sort of fallen off the radar,

01:15:10.600 | and not for good reasons, just 'cause I kind of forgot.

01:15:13.360 | And the nice thing about computers

01:15:15.320 | is that they don't forget things.

01:15:16.960 | And so where I think a lot of people go wrong,

01:15:19.200 | I've tried building a personal CRM product

01:15:22.980 | maybe five or six times,

01:15:24.720 | and it's very hard.

01:15:26.160 | I'm pretty confident that it's not a category

01:15:29.060 | that will ever work.

01:15:30.360 | The main reason is when I talk to people about it,

01:15:33.160 | what they expect a personal CRM to do

01:15:35.500 | is automate all of their personal relationships.

01:15:38.340 | And that's not what a personal CRM does.

01:15:40.480 | It really just obliges you to spend a lot more time

01:15:43.400 | managing your personal relationships.

01:15:45.660 | Instead of spending one hour per week,

01:15:47.180 | now you're spending 10 hours or 20 hours a week.

01:15:49.540 | But you get a lot more value from it,

01:15:52.280 | and it's much more impactful.

01:15:53.760 | So I spend an inordinate amount of my time

01:15:57.320 | just maintaining these relationships,

01:15:59.800 | and talking to people,

01:16:01.200 | and trying to see how I can help others.

01:16:03.360 | But it definitely takes a lot of time.

01:16:05.200 | There's no way to automate it.

01:16:06.720 | - Is there a tool you're using to keep track of it all?

01:16:09.360 | You mentioned kind of the renaming of locations earlier.

01:16:12.040 | - So honestly, I just use Airtable at this point.

01:16:14.460 | There was a really interesting article,

01:16:16.360 | forget where it was from,

01:16:17.840 | but it was with Peter Boyce from,

01:16:20.720 | he's a venture capitalist.

01:16:22.100 | And what was interesting was how,

01:16:23.800 | I think it's called Peter Boyce is a People Person,

01:16:26.200 | I think is the name of the article.

01:16:27.880 | What was interesting is how convergent

01:16:29.880 | our CRMs ended up being.

01:16:31.720 | He ended up building his own.

01:16:33.400 | They're 90% the same.

01:16:35.200 | And so there's only a very limited subset of information

01:16:38.560 | that's actually useful.

01:16:39.800 | Human brains are pretty good at networked thought.

01:16:42.560 | I do think that almost all of this stuff

01:16:44.400 | will eventually be solved by some of these new AI tools,

01:16:47.720 | because they're much better at contextual networked thought

01:16:51.840 | in a way that existing tools have not been.

01:16:54.140 | But having lists of people and lists of groups of people,

01:16:58.400 | all of my friends who play board games in San Francisco,

01:17:01.840 | I have that list.

01:17:03.460 | Location, San Francisco, tag with board games.

01:17:06.880 | And I just have subsets of people

01:17:09.840 | that I want to stay in touch with on some regular basis,

01:17:13.600 | people that I meet up with for coffee.

01:17:15.760 | And you just have these lists of people

01:17:17.460 | and their interests and their locations.

01:17:19.380 | And it's really not much more complicated than that.

01:17:22.440 | And it's just the practice of every Sunday

01:17:25.680 | I have a calendar block to just look through the list.

01:17:29.880 | That's the whole process.

01:17:31.360 | I just look at all the names and I go, oh, Nick.

01:17:34.480 | I haven't talked to Nick in a long time.

01:17:36.080 | I should send him a note.

01:17:37.240 | And then I give him a call.

01:17:38.480 | We catch up.

01:17:39.440 | Or it's like, oh, Anthony, yeah.

01:17:41.920 | Man, I haven't seen him in like two years.

01:17:44.680 | I wonder, is he still in Miami?

01:17:46.800 | I'm going to check in.

01:17:47.640 | And he's like, oh, just moved to San Francisco.

01:17:49.320 | We should get coffee sometime.

01:17:51.140 | Cool.

01:17:51.820 | It's a real event that happened.

01:17:53.160 | We're meeting for coffee soon.

01:17:54.540 | So just learning that practice of just looking

01:17:57.880 | through the names, your brain is much better

01:17:59.700 | at coming up with connections of other people, things

01:18:03.040 | that you're working on, and how it relates to those people

01:18:05.620 | than the computer will be, at least

01:18:07.380 | with current technology.

01:18:08.620 | So I have a similar list, which I didn't even

01:18:10.620 | think of as a personal CRM, which

01:18:12.100 | is just I have a subset of my contacts on my phone.

01:18:16.500 | And it's called walking calls.

01:18:18.100 | And it's basically like if I'm driving or walking,

01:18:21.220 | who are all the people that I want to regularly connect with?

01:18:24.100 | And I'll go in and scroll through them.

01:18:26.220 | What it doesn't do a good job of--

01:18:28.020 | and there was an app back in the day called eTax, which

01:18:31.300 | actually, I think it was Howie Liu who might--

01:18:34.320 | I would have to look it up.

01:18:35.440 | But there's a small chance that the person who actually

01:18:37.740 | started this company went on to start Airtable.

01:18:39.580 | I'm going to look this up after.

01:18:40.900 | But the cool thing it would do was

01:18:43.140 | it would sync with your email, and it would sync with your AT&T

01:18:45.980 | login, because pre-iMessage, all of your texts

01:18:49.540 | were routed through the carrier.

01:18:51.220 | And it wouldn't know what's in the text,

01:18:52.860 | but it would just know when you last emailed or texted

01:18:55.520 | or called this person.

01:18:57.320 | And the one thing that I want a CRM to do well--

01:19:00.660 | and maybe you have an EA do this--

01:19:03.420 | is just I want to find the people that I had let go.

01:19:06.540 | And I don't know how many people are in your list,

01:19:08.660 | but I imagine it's not 10.

01:19:11.140 | Do you have a way to sort it by when you last talked to them?

01:19:13.580 | And is it too much burden to keep that date up to date?

01:19:17.340 | It is too much burden to keep that up to date

01:19:19.780 | unless it's an automated tool.

01:19:21.260 | I had actually, in some of the previous versions of CRMs,

01:19:24.820 | I had actually figured out a way to do a lot of those things.

01:19:28.660 | So very tactically, the iMessage on your desktop

01:19:33.020 | is just like an unencrypted SQLite database

01:19:35.700 | that you can hack into and get all that data.

01:19:37.980 | So you can have a script that just figures out

01:19:40.500 | when you contacted these people, syncs it with your CRM,

01:19:43.560 | and what data you have on them there.

01:19:45.460 | Google Calendar has an API.

01:19:48.300 | When you create an event, when you cancel an event,

01:19:50.380 | whatever you do, there's webhooks

01:19:51.800 | that you can tie into.

01:19:53.460 | So you can then see, oh, I had a calendar event

01:19:55.540 | with this person, and that shows up.

01:19:57.860 | There's a lot of ways that you can do this stuff.

01:20:00.480 | But the reality is just I didn't really--

01:20:03.540 | I didn't use it.

01:20:05.260 | It was a lot of work, and it just didn't add a lot of value.

01:20:08.580 | But these are totally achievable things

01:20:10.900 | if somebody wanted to build it.

01:20:12.180 | And one thing that I've heard you talk about before,

01:20:14.340 | which changed my perspective on, I don't know, random meetings,

01:20:17.940 | was I think my default assumption was, well,

01:20:21.020 | if I'm going to prioritize meeting someone,

01:20:23.540 | let's prioritize someone who we have

01:20:25.640 | a lot of mutual friends with.

01:20:27.340 | Seemed like it made sense.

01:20:28.980 | And then I heard you talk about why the opposite might actually

01:20:33.100 | be more beneficial.

01:20:34.740 | So the have a lot of mutual friends with,

01:20:38.060 | there's a term called network homophily, which

01:20:40.380 | is how similar are all the people in your network.

01:20:43.780 | And I don't want to say network homophily is a bad thing,

01:20:46.780 | but it definitely has trade-offs.

01:20:48.700 | And you limit your exposure, and you end up in a dense network.

01:20:52.100 | There's a concept called eigenvector centrality, which

01:20:55.020 | is really this idea of it's not just how many people do you

01:20:58.380 | know, but it's the second and third order effect of how many

01:21:01.060 | people do each of them know.

01:21:02.660 | If you're connected to all of these super connected people

01:21:05.820 | in each of these dense networks, you

01:21:08.060 | are a much more connected person.

01:21:09.900 | You will likely be able to deliver a lot more value

01:21:12.260 | in your life.

01:21:13.500 | You can use the network connectivity

01:21:16.220 | as maybe a proxy for potential quality of the conversation.

01:21:20.620 | But I think there are a lot of other ways

01:21:23.820 | to try to inject that diversity into it.

01:21:26.780 | In New York, I used to host these dinners.

01:21:29.100 | Hopefully, I'll start doing these again in San Francisco,

01:21:31.580 | called second degree dinners.

01:21:33.780 | Have you ever heard of this format?

01:21:35.300 | It's pretty fun.

01:21:36.500 | The idea is you start with, let's say

01:21:38.580 | you want to end up with 12 people.

01:21:40.580 | So you start with a core group of four people.

01:21:43.620 | And each of you invites somebody that you are confident nobody

01:21:47.540 | else knows.

01:21:48.820 | And then you ask that person to invite somebody

01:21:51.860 | that they think nobody else in the group will know.

01:21:54.780 | And so you end up with 12 people, most of whom

01:21:57.260 | don't know each other.

01:21:59.460 | But everyone whom knows one person.

01:22:01.380 | That's right.

01:22:01.940 | But everyone knows one person.

01:22:03.140 | That's right.

01:22:04.020 | And so it is almost necessarily going

01:22:07.420 | to be a much more diverse and interesting group of people

01:22:12.260 | than you would ordinarily have at a dinner party.

01:22:15.500 | Which would be your seven best friends.

01:22:17.620 | It would be exactly.

01:22:18.500 | It's your seven best friends.

01:22:19.860 | I host a lot of different types of dinners

01:22:21.780 | for these sorts of things.

01:22:22.900 | And each of them has their own intent.

01:22:24.500 | And that one is more like--

01:22:26.740 | it is rare that you would host some sort of event

01:22:29.260 | where you have a sculptor, a stand-up comedian, an investment

01:22:34.060 | banker.

01:22:34.860 | You just have this completely random eclectic mix

01:22:38.140 | of people that would otherwise not have interacted.

01:22:41.420 | And those can be a lot of fun.

01:22:43.100 | I hope to maybe--

01:22:44.860 | well, I guess maybe I know too many people.

01:22:46.780 | I know too many people to get the invite.

01:22:50.100 | Though I do fall in this new subset of once you have

01:22:52.580 | children, you're like, well, now I

01:22:53.700 | need people who are willing to go to dinner at 530.

01:22:56.340 | Or at 9.

01:22:57.540 | When the kids are asleep.

01:22:58.540 | But I want to circle back.

01:22:59.820 | We spent a little bit of time on some tools.

01:23:01.660 | We talked about using voice delegation.

01:23:03.700 | I think you and I share--

01:23:05.300 | maybe passion is the right word.

01:23:06.740 | I'm not sure.

01:23:07.380 | But for optimal communication and productivity and tools

01:23:12.180 | and everything, let's talk about some of the other tools

01:23:14.740 | you use to organize information, access it quickly,

01:23:18.820 | and spend less time on things that you don't

01:23:22.020 | want to spend more time on.

01:23:23.380 | Yeah, so Notion is a really good tool

01:23:25.660 | for keeping track of documentation internally.

01:23:28.820 | You probably know this because I imagine

01:23:30.540 | you are pretty deep into Notion.

01:23:32.060 | But there's the very simple version of there's a page,

01:23:34.260 | it's a wiki.

01:23:35.300 | And then there's the advanced version of Notion

01:23:37.260 | with databases, linking.

01:23:39.380 | You have all of this.

01:23:40.660 | Notion is a really flexible, very advanced tool.

01:23:44.740 | If you go deep into the inner workings of Notion,

01:23:47.500 | there is a lot more functionality in Notion

01:23:49.660 | than most people realize.

01:23:50.940 | They recently added automation, which

01:23:52.980 | I found for the podcast.

01:23:54.620 | Every time I source a new deal, a favorite, a tweet,

01:23:58.340 | it shows up in a database.

01:23:59.860 | As soon as we start working on it,

01:24:01.300 | it posts it to Slack, to a channel.

01:24:02.980 | You could do a lot.

01:24:04.700 | Do you use it in your personal life also?

01:24:06.940 | Yeah, for sure.

01:24:07.780 | My wife and I, we do a weekly family priorities

01:24:13.540 | where we have a list of some of this just logistics,

01:24:16.420 | like travel and expenses.

01:24:19.460 | And some of it is also things that

01:24:21.740 | bothered us during the week that we want to talk about.

01:24:24.700 | And we have all of it.

01:24:26.020 | It's like a weekly running one-on-one doc

01:24:28.380 | that we discuss every week.

01:24:29.940 | It's been very, very useful.

01:24:31.780 | I've gotten so many requests from people to explain--

01:24:35.220 | do a whole episode on how I use Notion.

01:24:37.700 | And I'm like, I don't even know where to start.

01:24:39.820 | It feels so personal.

01:24:40.900 | It's like, well, I want to take a trip.

01:24:42.660 | So I make a database.

01:24:43.500 | And I put all the trips in the database.

01:24:44.780 | And then each one has a page.

01:24:45.900 | And each one has a checklist.

01:24:47.100 | And it's like, you could go down these rabbit holes.

01:24:49.220 | But at the highest level, you can combine everything

01:24:52.860 | you would normally put in a spreadsheet,

01:24:54.500 | but in a database, which could do more.

01:24:56.420 | Everything you would put in a document

01:24:58.020 | could do more.

01:24:58.500 | You can link it all together and search it.

01:25:01.020 | And I don't know, that tool--

01:25:02.780 | You can publish it as a website.

01:25:04.460 | Yeah.

01:25:05.500 | OK, I know we both use email as kind

01:25:09.500 | of a triaging automated system.

01:25:12.300 | I'm using Superhuman.

01:25:14.100 | I know you have used Superhuman, are considering building

01:25:17.100 | something, or building it right now.

01:25:19.260 | How do you think first before the systems,

01:25:21.620 | just in general, about email?

01:25:23.220 | Because I think all of us, work, personal,

01:25:26.220 | feel overwhelmed by email.

01:25:27.660 | We'll start with the good things about email,

01:25:29.740 | which is email is threaded.

01:25:32.740 | And email is quantized.

01:25:34.460 | So we'll take Slack as a good opposite example.

01:25:37.900 | Slack is effectively a superset of text messaging.

01:25:41.700 | It is a relentless firehose of information.

01:25:45.420 | Anyone who's worked in a company that uses Slack,

01:25:48.060 | if you go offline for like three days,

01:25:50.860 | and you come back to Slack, you feel hopelessly behind.

01:25:55.180 | And you have to like scroll and figure out,

01:25:57.020 | what did I miss?

01:25:58.220 | Because it's just, it's all coming.

01:25:59.820 | It's like being in a WhatsApp group.

01:26:01.860 | Like I just checked earlier today,

01:26:04.700 | there's some thread that I don't,

01:26:06.300 | I haven't even checked what it is yet,

01:26:07.540 | that must have blown up.

01:26:08.580 | I have like 128 messages on WhatsApp.

01:26:11.820 | It's like, am I really going to be able to filter

01:26:14.700 | through all of those to see if any of them are relevant?

01:26:17.420 | Probably not.

01:26:18.700 | You just end up muting them, and then they go away.

01:26:21.060 | So the nice thing about email is that because it's threaded

01:26:24.340 | and quantized, each idea is encapsulated in one item.

01:26:29.220 | People can respond on that one item,

01:26:32.140 | but it doesn't impact you anymore.

01:26:34.060 | You could just mute.

01:26:35.220 | It's like, oh, I don't want to engage in this topic.

01:26:37.700 | And you can delete it, you can mute it,

01:26:39.460 | whatever you want to do,

01:26:40.700 | but you don't miss all of the information

01:26:43.180 | from all of the people.

01:26:44.860 | So the problem with email is that the signal to noise ratio

01:26:49.180 | in email is extremely low.

01:26:51.660 | Partly because anyone can just send you an email.

01:26:54.580 | I was actually talking to somebody about this very recently

01:26:56.460 | that all of these marketing agencies with dashes

01:27:01.460 | in their URL, like does anybody actually open those?

01:27:05.440 | I cannot imagine that sending this much spam email

01:27:09.020 | is delivering value for anybody, but it must be.

01:27:12.060 | And there's just so much of it,

01:27:13.220 | and it's so hard to stay on top of it.

01:27:14.980 | So that's the major problem with email,

01:27:17.140 | is that anyone else can effectively impose

01:27:20.740 | their priority on you, onto your attention.

01:27:23.740 | I don't have a great solution for it yet.

01:27:25.560 | We have really tried a lot of different tools.

01:27:28.580 | We ended up building our own comms tool

01:27:31.220 | to try to solve this problem.

01:27:32.900 | We're planning to externalize it, probably in Q1.

01:27:36.220 | My hope is that it'll be a drop-in replacement

01:27:39.220 | for Superhuman and Slack,

01:27:41.220 | and really any other workplace communication tool

01:27:43.940 | people are using.

01:27:45.140 | Almost all of these tools are designed by people

01:27:47.300 | who are either social media product managers

01:27:49.980 | in their past life, or video game designers.

01:27:52.580 | They're not people who are designing tools

01:27:54.360 | with deep work as the major focus.

01:27:56.620 | That's really been the major effort

01:27:58.260 | that we've been working on there.

01:27:59.760 | - Within email, one thing that I think has helped,

01:28:03.380 | so yes, everyone has access to your inbox.

01:28:05.220 | It can be overwhelming.

01:28:06.500 | The more you can view it as a thing

01:28:08.700 | that you can process quickly, the less you dwell on it.

01:28:11.620 | When I watch some people manage their inbox,

01:28:14.340 | it's I open an email, I open it, I think about it.

01:28:18.500 | And mine is like, first I'll just go through the inbox,

01:28:20.620 | and I'll be like, what can I just quickly delete?

01:28:22.820 | And like, keyboard shortcut,

01:28:24.700 | and maybe it's not delete and archive,

01:28:26.100 | but it's like J-J-J-E-E-E-J-J.

01:28:28.180 | Like, I'm just trying to get everything out.

01:28:30.180 | I do like one pass.

01:28:31.880 | I know this breaks a lot of people's principles,

01:28:33.540 | which is like only touch an email twice or once.

01:28:36.540 | But I'm like, one pass, get rid of all the bad stuff

01:28:40.140 | that I don't even need.

01:28:40.980 | And that's something that you can usually

01:28:43.180 | solve through delegation as well.

01:28:45.140 | Then when I'm going through it, it's like,

01:28:47.020 | each email is going to go somewhere.

01:28:49.820 | It's either going to be quickly replied to,

01:28:52.220 | or be filed to deal with later,

01:28:53.880 | or be hidden to come back later and dealt with.

01:28:56.460 | Being able to do that quickly,

01:28:57.900 | I think is an underrated skill.

01:29:00.020 | I think a lot of people are like,

01:29:00.860 | well, I don't need to be the productivity export,

01:29:03.020 | learn the keyboard shortcuts, superhuman,

01:29:06.540 | or any tool like that that I'd have to pay for

01:29:08.820 | to just use my inbox.

01:29:10.720 | I don't know how to say anything other than like,

01:29:13.720 | I think you're wrong.

01:29:15.500 | There's actually really good data on this,

01:29:17.580 | which I'm happy to share.

01:29:19.380 | Like there's so much data on how much more productive

01:29:23.660 | people are using hotkeys, or keyboard shortcuts.

01:29:28.660 | Depending on what your role is,

01:29:31.860 | there's a bunch of different studies

01:29:33.060 | trying for different tasks.

01:29:34.740 | People automatically, with a very short period of training,

01:29:39.140 | see something like a 10 to 40% increase in productivity

01:29:43.420 | for the rest of their lives,

01:29:45.240 | just by learning these shortcuts.

01:29:47.460 | If you're in a role where you're doing a lot

01:29:50.580 | of manual clicking and typing,

01:29:53.620 | and you're in a particular tool a lot,

01:29:55.640 | that's on the higher end.

01:29:57.140 | If you just process email occasionally,

01:29:59.980 | it still is useful.

01:30:01.060 | There's a tremendous amount of evidence

01:30:02.740 | for why learning these is such a positive thing,

01:30:05.740 | and it's everybody needs to do it.

01:30:07.540 | It's really what it comes down to.

01:30:09.000 | For very little effort, you get free productivity forever.

01:30:12.460 | - And this is not just true for email.

01:30:14.020 | Like most apps you use on your computer,

01:30:16.980 | and I imagine everyone knows how to copy and paste.

01:30:20.060 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:30:20.900 | - And like, take how simple copy and paste makes your life.

01:30:24.300 | Instead of dragging your cursor up and clicking the icon,

01:30:27.580 | that applies everywhere.

01:30:29.060 | I remember working in finance,

01:30:30.720 | like I went to an Excel training,

01:30:33.180 | and it was like, you can go deep

01:30:34.700 | if you're in a specific area,

01:30:36.460 | and it will also greatly increase your productivity.

01:30:39.460 | But I think at a bare minimum, email shortcuts,

01:30:43.140 | which for some reason, even Gmail,

01:30:44.900 | you have to manually enable.

01:30:46.500 | So go enable it, go look up,

01:30:48.780 | used to be able to buy stickers

01:30:49.820 | and put them on your keyboard,

01:30:50.780 | but I think you can pretty quickly learn them,

01:30:53.340 | is such an unlock.

01:30:54.940 | - Yeah, definitely.

01:30:55.940 | - And within Slack or whatever app you use,

01:30:57.960 | I would encourage that.

01:30:58.800 | And then broad computer-wise,

01:31:01.380 | just the number of people that I've witnessed

01:31:04.740 | not using on a Mac, Command + Tab,

01:31:07.780 | Control + Tab or Alt + Tab on a PC,

01:31:10.340 | just to be able to jump between windows

01:31:12.860 | within an app, within windows outside of an app,

01:31:15.680 | maybe Chrome, to be able to switch through tabs

01:31:18.260 | or whatever browser you're using.

01:31:19.980 | - Yeah, a few other things related to that,

01:31:21.380 | I would say Text Expander,

01:31:23.180 | which I know is something that you're familiar with.

01:31:25.540 | Text Expander is an awesome one

01:31:26.860 | when you're using snippets

01:31:27.820 | across all these different platforms.

01:31:30.140 | - And the principle there, for people who don't know,

01:31:31.600 | you can create a piece of text

01:31:34.140 | that is your address.

01:31:36.440 | You can have a shortcut for it

01:31:38.220 | to be able to drop your address in.

01:31:39.940 | And if you don't wanna download an app and do this,

01:31:41.940 | I actually use just the default Mac text replacement.

01:31:46.500 | So if I type ch @ symbol,

01:31:49.500 | it replaces it with my email address.

01:31:51.380 | So there are a few things

01:31:52.660 | where I've actually just built it into iOS,

01:31:55.060 | which is great, it works on your phone,

01:31:56.660 | which I don't know if Text Expander works on your phone.

01:31:59.180 | They might-- - I've used it on my phone.

01:32:00.700 | - But that's the hack on a phone,

01:32:01.800 | is you can go in and create a keyboard

01:32:03.760 | that would just turn OMW into On My Way,

01:32:07.100 | or whatever things you might say a lot.

01:32:09.200 | Or you can use Text Expander, which has more functionality.

01:32:12.100 | Superhuman has snippets built into it.

01:32:14.540 | - Nice thing about Text Expander,

01:32:16.300 | I don't use the specific key shortcuts, like ch @.

01:32:21.300 | I pretty much exclusively use it, the search functionality.

01:32:24.440 | So you can just paste the entire snippet in,

01:32:29.000 | and it will just infer as you're typing.

01:32:31.700 | You can start the search on Text Expander,

01:32:33.820 | and as you're typing in words,

01:32:35.160 | it filters it down to the one that you want.

01:32:36.980 | So you don't have to memorize nearly as many hotkeys.

01:32:40.360 | - So I use Alfred instead of Text Expander for this.

01:32:43.120 | And the thing I love is that it merges your snippets

01:32:46.920 | with your history of your clipboard.

01:32:49.040 | So with the same keyboard shortcut,

01:32:51.000 | I pull up anything I've ever copied and pasted

01:32:53.480 | in the last, I don't know how long it goes, 30 days,

01:32:56.800 | with a priority for anything that's a snippet.

01:33:00.280 | So I find myself, and the clipboard functionality

01:33:04.000 | works with photos.

01:33:06.040 | So if I wanna go screen grab three things,

01:33:08.940 | I screen grab, screen grab, screen grab,

01:33:10.700 | and I can go in and I think it's option command C,

01:33:14.780 | pulls up and I'm like, I wanna paste this,

01:33:16.700 | paste this, paste this.

01:33:17.940 | And so it combines the two.

01:33:19.020 | But Text Expander, I also don't use

01:33:21.500 | the keyboard shortcuts for it.

01:33:23.020 | It's more about being able to have a database of things

01:33:25.020 | that I wanna throw in.

01:33:26.220 | And then I use snippets within Superhuman,

01:33:28.060 | which I could probably combine those.

01:33:29.860 | I can't remember, but I think it includes

01:33:32.100 | some HTML or hybrid formatting.

01:33:35.220 | So if you wanted to say like, here's a link to my website,

01:33:39.160 | when you paste it, you could actually have the HTML in there.

01:33:42.120 | I can't remember if Alfred does that,

01:33:43.480 | but I believe Text Expander does.

01:33:45.320 | So that's one.

01:33:46.160 | - The thing I always try to help people do

01:33:48.000 | is instead of using their cursor

01:33:50.120 | and going down into their dock to open each app,

01:33:52.800 | they do command space and you type the thing.

01:33:55.460 | It's a very coder way to do it,

01:33:57.200 | but it's much, much, much faster.

01:33:58.800 | Instead of like going down, which of these 40 icons

01:34:03.240 | is the one that I want?

01:34:04.940 | And it really slows things down when you have to do that.

01:34:07.580 | - Yeah, my dock is now like five things.

01:34:09.620 | - Yeah, mine too.

01:34:10.580 | - Because I just searched for it.

01:34:11.620 | I've disabled spotlight for Alfred,

01:34:13.860 | which is like a tool to do the same.

01:34:15.660 | There's another tool that if I can find it,

01:34:17.500 | I'll put in the show notes that people have recommended.

01:34:20.060 | I believe it has--

01:34:20.900 | - It could be Raycast. - Raycast.

01:34:21.940 | I knew it had the word Ray in it as an alternative,

01:34:24.020 | which I've heard great things about.

01:34:25.500 | The one thing we didn't talk about in depth is calendaring.

01:34:29.420 | And you mentioned earlier, like doing an audit,

01:34:31.500 | making sure things are in your calendar.

01:34:33.360 | I wanna talk about it because I think I'm terrible at it.

01:34:36.760 | On the whole, I looked at this list,

01:34:38.080 | I was like, I'm great at Notion, I'm great at email,

01:34:40.040 | I'm great at a lot of productivity things.

01:34:42.440 | If you look at my calendar, there's like four things on it.

01:34:44.560 | And sometimes my EA's like,

01:34:46.520 | "Oh, you need to do this thing,

01:34:47.360 | "she'll put it on my calendar."

01:34:48.320 | And I just don't, I'm like,

01:34:49.320 | "Well, why would I do it?

01:34:50.400 | "I can do it later."

01:34:51.720 | How have you created discipline to use your calendar

01:34:55.660 | both as a place of what to do

01:34:59.120 | and as a record of what you did?

01:35:01.400 | - I wish I had a better answer

01:35:02.900 | other than to have discipline to do that.

01:35:05.480 | Let's say I ostensibly set a priority

01:35:08.520 | as I wanna make sure that I am spending a lot of time

01:35:13.520 | recruiting new engineers.

01:35:15.260 | That's my priority for this month.

01:35:17.040 | Having that feedback mechanism of my EA

01:35:20.160 | giving you my monthly report and saying,

01:35:21.700 | "You spent one hour doing this thing this whole month."

01:35:25.560 | That's a real wake up call for me to say,

01:35:27.740 | "Oh, wow, I need to move things around."

01:35:30.260 | Because my stated priority is clearly not reflected

01:35:33.400 | in my empirical record of priorities.

01:35:35.840 | Having that feedback loop, I think,

01:35:37.240 | helps with the discipline

01:35:38.860 | because it allows me to reorient my time.

01:35:42.260 | It probably started much more so

01:35:44.880 | in the retroactively capturing what I'm doing.

01:35:48.000 | And then I started proactively looking into the future

01:35:52.040 | and projecting what I would be spending my time on.

01:35:54.680 | So that's probably the order

01:35:56.440 | in which that was more of a thing

01:35:57.840 | because this whole process for me

01:35:59.640 | actually started when I was doing

01:36:01.420 | a lot of software consulting work.

01:36:03.760 | And it was just a pragmatic aspect

01:36:06.560 | of I need to know who to bill how much time for.

01:36:10.140 | That's really where it started for me

01:36:12.100 | was I started keeping track historically

01:36:14.440 | of how much time I was spending on each project.

01:36:17.120 | And then I realized that I now have to project

01:36:19.420 | into the future how many projects

01:36:20.840 | can I manage at the same time.

01:36:23.080 | And I would add those blocks into my calendar.

01:36:26.000 | And I realized I can only support this many projects.

01:36:28.480 | So I would say that's probably the order

01:36:30.360 | that I would approach it if you were to give it a shot.

01:36:32.860 | - And are you naturally not a procrastinator?

01:36:36.000 | - I'm very much a procrastinator.

01:36:38.160 | Part of the answer is I create a lot of scaffolding

01:36:41.200 | around how I spend my time and what my priorities are.

01:36:44.740 | I can give a recent example,

01:36:46.040 | something I need to deliver by next Wednesday.

01:36:48.920 | I'm not gonna put it on my calendar for tomorrow

01:36:51.400 | because I know I'm just gonna not do it.

01:36:54.280 | So I'd usually, I'll put it on my calendar

01:36:56.480 | probably for Tuesday.

01:36:58.080 | And I think it's gonna take me about four hours.

01:37:00.080 | So I block off four hours on Tuesday

01:37:02.720 | 'cause I have to deliver it by Wednesday.

01:37:04.340 | I'm not gonna be super optimistic

01:37:06.620 | about what is gonna happen

01:37:08.320 | 'cause I have enough of these empirical records

01:37:10.920 | to know how this pattern goes

01:37:13.080 | is I'm just gonna not do it until Tuesday anyway.

01:37:15.600 | So I might as well just put it on Tuesday.

01:37:17.760 | Being able to project how you're spending your time,

01:37:21.280 | it brings procrastination into much more focus.

01:37:25.140 | Let's say you know you need to do this by Wednesday

01:37:28.080 | and you say, yeah, I'll just deal with this later.

01:37:30.240 | I have plenty of time.

01:37:31.840 | But if you look at your calendar

01:37:33.080 | and you realize that actually you do not,

01:37:35.400 | you don't have any time to do this between now and next week

01:37:39.640 | you have to figure out how to move your calendar around

01:37:41.680 | that it brings it much more into focus

01:37:43.840 | and makes procrastination a lot harder

01:37:46.320 | because you would just realize

01:37:47.220 | that you either have to cut things

01:37:48.780 | from what your current calendar is

01:37:50.640 | or you have to bring it further back in time

01:37:53.340 | to be able to do it earlier.

01:37:54.560 | My challenge might actually be less

01:37:56.480 | that I don't wanna do the important thing

01:37:59.440 | but that some random thing has come up

01:38:01.800 | that I'm excited about.

01:38:03.240 | And to go full circle with an example,

01:38:05.440 | recently I realized that someone

01:38:09.480 | who as a company we owe money to sent me a bill,

01:38:12.480 | sat in the inbox, forgot to pay it.

01:38:14.640 | And I was like, there should just be a system

01:38:16.560 | where someone could, you know, when I work with vendors

01:38:19.640 | I send them an email to like invoicing at

01:38:22.640 | and I send them our invoice and it gets paid.

01:38:25.640 | So I was like, oh, I need something like that.

01:38:26.920 | And I was like, oh, what are the tools?

01:38:28.240 | Oh, well, QuickBooks can do it

01:38:29.480 | and bill.com can do it and Melio can do it

01:38:32.280 | and a few banks have it.

01:38:33.560 | And it's like, ooh, I wanna go play with all the,

01:38:35.200 | and I was like, I just got excited.

01:38:36.760 | So to go back, I'm sure many people listening

01:38:39.040 | are like that sounds like a horrible task.

01:38:40.960 | I would never wanna spend my free time

01:38:42.920 | researching accounting software to track accounts payable.

01:38:46.440 | - Sounds like a really good pass to delegate to an EA.

01:38:49.520 | - For you, for me, I was like, it was exciting.

01:38:52.160 | Like I was, how you might feel programming,

01:38:54.840 | I felt evaluating accounting tools.

01:38:57.840 | And so I'm like, gosh, today I have to do this thing

01:39:00.320 | but this thing that's really exciting.

01:39:02.560 | I think maybe what I need to get better at is like,

01:39:05.440 | it's actually less about when I put the time

01:39:08.400 | for the thing I do.

01:39:09.280 | It's about capturing the thing I'm exciting about

01:39:11.400 | and putting it somewhere so that I know I get to do it.

01:39:15.000 | - Yeah, I do this all the time.

01:39:16.360 | If I was to show you my calendar now, you would see

01:39:19.120 | there's two CSS properties that somehow I just missed

01:39:23.040 | that they were released, which is I've been using Flexbox

01:39:26.320 | for a lot of things and grid is now a thing.

01:39:28.800 | Somehow I missed that, which is a really cool way

01:39:31.320 | of orienting items in CSS.

01:39:34.560 | The other one that I missed is clamp.

01:39:36.480 | Somehow I missed when that got released,

01:39:38.160 | which effectively does away with all these

01:39:40.220 | really tedious media queries.

01:39:42.400 | And I was super excited when I discovered this.

01:39:44.920 | How did I miss that this exists?

01:39:47.400 | And I felt really motivated to do it at that exact moment.

01:39:52.400 | But then I looked at my calendar,

01:39:53.880 | it's like, I don't have time.

01:39:55.280 | So I put an hour on my calendar.

01:39:58.640 | The next time I had availability,

01:40:00.200 | which was like three days later, I put the links in there.

01:40:04.040 | I was able to externalize it and say,

01:40:05.800 | I'm not gonna forget about this.

01:40:07.560 | It's in my calendar.

01:40:08.740 | I will eventually get to it.

01:40:10.020 | And I'm gonna learn these things.

01:40:11.480 | - Have you gotten to do that yet?

01:40:12.880 | - No, I think it might be today, actually.

01:40:15.480 | - We should, I won't keep you from CSS,

01:40:19.560 | which similarly sounds like something

01:40:20.960 | I enjoy going down rabbit hole.

01:40:22.440 | I think I just enjoy going down

01:40:24.180 | learning rabbit holes too much.

01:40:26.200 | So that makes it just super challenging.

01:40:27.680 | - Yeah, and I think where a lot of people struggle with this

01:40:29.360 | and this is certainly where I used to struggle with this,

01:40:31.320 | is that it feels like if you don't do it now,

01:40:34.080 | it's gonna just fall into the void.

01:40:36.280 | But if you put it on your calendar

01:40:37.560 | and you're disciplined about sticking to your calendar,

01:40:40.200 | you will get to it.

01:40:41.360 | The nice thing about calendars

01:40:42.840 | is that things happen linearly.

01:40:45.760 | Like time will elapse.

01:40:47.080 | You will eventually get to the item

01:40:48.680 | and you will have to do something with it.

01:40:50.560 | - I think one example that actually helped

01:40:53.440 | when it comes to email,

01:40:54.700 | a lot of people that are listening

01:40:56.080 | probably leave their email open all day,

01:40:57.740 | which I think is a habit that sometimes I'm better

01:41:00.840 | and sometimes I'm worse at sticking to.

01:41:02.860 | And I thought, gosh, if I close my email,

01:41:04.960 | then I'll miss something.

01:41:06.660 | What I found was when I don't look at my email

01:41:09.040 | for three hours, it's like I have so much

01:41:11.400 | exciting things to see.

01:41:12.960 | Like that joy that you would get these little blips of,

01:41:15.600 | instead of getting the little blips, you got a big one.

01:41:17.840 | And I actually liked it more.

01:41:18.860 | So right now I haven't looked at my email

01:41:20.560 | our entire conversation and I'm like,

01:41:21.920 | ooh, I'm kind of excited to go see what's in there

01:41:24.560 | and probably archive most of it.

01:41:26.080 | - So there's a useful tool,

01:41:28.560 | not coincidentally, the tool that we're building

01:41:30.880 | has a feature called scheduled delivery,

01:41:33.120 | which batches your messages.

01:41:35.320 | So that even if you checked, you wouldn't see anything.

01:41:38.280 | It actually hides them from you

01:41:39.440 | until it's time that you specify.

01:41:41.440 | If you write out that you want to process email

01:41:45.040 | from one o'clock to two o'clock,

01:41:47.200 | it'll just hide everything from you.

01:41:49.200 | There's a way to break the glass

01:41:50.280 | and get the data if you want it,

01:41:52.000 | but it'll hide it from you until that moment.

01:41:54.040 | So you don't feel this urge to compulsively check.

01:41:56.640 | There's a tool that I use that really inspired

01:41:59.880 | a lot of this, which is called Mailman.

01:42:02.080 | I think their website's Mailman HQ.

01:42:04.320 | Very, very simple product.

01:42:05.680 | All it does is it batches your email.

01:42:08.420 | And so you say, I want my email to be delivered to me

01:42:11.080 | at one o'clock and five o'clock, and that's it.

01:42:14.120 | And so what's nice is it's useful to think

01:42:16.600 | about these things cognitively in terms of dopamine loops.

01:42:20.800 | If you check your email and there's nothing there,

01:42:24.320 | you don't get that dopamine reward.

01:42:26.180 | But if you constantly check, it's like,

01:42:27.920 | ooh, new information.

01:42:29.160 | Ooh, there's a little dot.

01:42:30.160 | Ooh, I can check that.

01:42:31.000 | I feel like I just did something.

01:42:32.520 | I marked junk mail as done.

01:42:34.640 | I've achieved something.

01:42:36.320 | You get that dopamine reinforcement.

01:42:38.700 | And what's nice about these tools is that

01:42:41.580 | if you check it enough times and there's nothing new there,

01:42:44.420 | you eventually just give up.

01:42:45.700 | And that compulsive behavioral trait just evaporates.

01:42:49.940 | And you don't feel that compulsive need to check anymore.

01:42:52.420 | The data on this stuff is really frightening.

01:42:55.120 | There's some data around use of Slack

01:42:57.060 | and other workplace communications tools like email.

01:43:00.180 | For knowledge workers, I think it was something like

01:43:03.300 | 60% of knowledge workers cannot go more than six minutes

01:43:07.860 | without checking a communications tool.

01:43:10.020 | I think it was almost half of knowledge workers

01:43:12.680 | never at any point get more than 30 minutes

01:43:16.200 | of uninterrupted time ever, which I just,

01:43:18.700 | I cannot even fathom how people get work done,

01:43:21.720 | especially doing software development.

01:43:23.580 | It's just impossible.

01:43:24.920 | - I regularly miss messages during the workday

01:43:29.680 | 'cause I have my phone set to go into work mode,

01:43:32.140 | which doesn't surface anything.

01:43:34.500 | I do think that, and I don't know if you're building this

01:43:36.660 | into your tool, there are probably a few things,

01:43:39.380 | and I don't know how to figure out what they are

01:43:41.020 | 'cause I don't have an obvious rule set

01:43:43.140 | that it's like, I would like to know about that.

01:43:45.940 | You could probably filter it on keyword or sender,

01:43:49.060 | but there are some things that I do wanna know about.

01:43:51.220 | And then there are some things like the worst is on Slack.

01:43:54.300 | There is no way to have,

01:43:57.140 | and if anyone listening knows a way, let me know,

01:43:59.540 | a Google Drive integration that will notify you

01:44:04.380 | of some things, which like I shared something to someone

01:44:06.820 | and it wasn't shared and I meant to share it,

01:44:09.900 | but I went and said, anyone can edit it in our org,

01:44:12.460 | but I forgot to say with the link.

01:44:14.300 | And I got a push on Slack that was like,

01:44:15.900 | "Hey, do you wanna grant access?"

01:44:17.980 | I was like, oh, this is so helpful.

01:44:19.180 | It was early in the morning.

01:44:20.020 | I could hit one button, grant access.

01:44:22.080 | But then someone was editing a doc and every minute

01:44:24.300 | I got a, "This person edited, this person edited."

01:44:26.300 | I was like, I don't, this is crazy.

01:44:28.380 | Suppress it all.

01:44:29.820 | I would love to see some ability to kind of filter out

01:44:32.580 | that stuff, but let the, you missed a payment,

01:44:35.740 | come through that I need to resolve.

01:44:37.500 | - The signal to noise problem in communications

01:44:39.780 | is just fundamentally hard.

01:44:41.660 | We do have some specific heuristics

01:44:43.560 | on how we're solving that problem.

01:44:45.660 | When it's intra-org, you can largely trust

01:44:49.660 | the other people in your org

01:44:51.860 | to be responsible stewards of your time.

01:44:54.580 | And so you can't do this with email.

01:44:57.500 | Like if you let every spam marketer set the priority,

01:45:00.900 | like everything, priority zero, interrupt him immediately.

01:45:04.780 | This is the highest priority thing.

01:45:06.860 | You need to work with our agency.

01:45:08.620 | It's another one of these.

01:45:09.840 | But within your company, people are usually pretty good

01:45:12.780 | about setting something to the right level of priority

01:45:15.660 | or setting a date in the future.

01:45:17.660 | It's one of the things that we were working on

01:45:19.200 | is you can say this will become high priority on Wednesday

01:45:23.860 | if you haven't done it by Wednesday.

01:45:25.380 | (laughs)

01:45:26.500 | You can specify some of these things

01:45:28.060 | where you have like an escalation path

01:45:30.940 | over some time period.

01:45:32.140 | So yeah, it's a fundamentally hard problem

01:45:34.780 | and I don't think any of these tools have solved it.

01:45:36.660 | - But I've also played with a little

01:45:37.820 | is around AI and all these things.

01:45:39.940 | I'm curious how AI has fit into,

01:45:43.500 | to go back to our earlier conversation, delegation

01:45:46.340 | and how much you or even your EAs

01:45:50.020 | have been able to lean into it

01:45:51.460 | as a way to become more efficient.

01:45:53.900 | - It's incredibly helpful for things

01:45:55.240 | like doing meeting summaries.

01:45:57.580 | I don't think that we're leveraging it

01:45:59.140 | as much as we could be.

01:46:01.940 | It would be interesting, this is maybe a question

01:46:04.500 | I should just ask some folks at Athena,

01:46:07.100 | is that if Athena is a staffing agency

01:46:09.700 | or some of these other companies,

01:46:10.940 | if they view themselves as staffing agencies, that's fine.

01:46:14.340 | But it would be interesting as this category evolves,

01:46:18.540 | if they view themselves much more

01:46:19.900 | as a task completion company

01:46:22.380 | and the abstraction of having people and staff

01:46:26.440 | is actually less important than the completion of tasks

01:46:29.680 | on some regular basis,

01:46:31.320 | you can imagine a world where you record

01:46:35.000 | loom of your workflow throughout the entire day.

01:46:38.080 | And there's some AI process that analyzes that video

01:46:41.200 | and then recommends how it could automate

01:46:43.320 | half of the things that you did.

01:46:45.160 | And it wouldn't require a person

01:46:46.720 | and you would just say like, accept.

01:46:48.720 | I accept this delegation forever at zero cost.

01:46:52.080 | That would be pretty awesome.

01:46:53.480 | And I don't think we're that far away from it.

01:46:55.400 | I would bet within the next 10 years,

01:46:57.600 | we have something that's fairly similar to that.

01:46:59.960 | - Right now, my solution has been to get a good sense

01:47:02.980 | of the things that I wanna do

01:47:04.520 | and then encourage my EA not to think

01:47:09.120 | that using AI is cheating.

01:47:11.120 | You know, it's like, this is a tool.

01:47:12.640 | If it can make you more efficient, use it.

01:47:15.000 | And I've found that it's not good

01:47:17.720 | at necessarily doing things, the execution of things,

01:47:21.360 | but it's fairly good at the brainstorming

01:47:24.960 | and thinking of things.

01:47:26.200 | What topics would I wanna talk about?

01:47:28.800 | A use case that I'd never even considered

01:47:30.600 | that a friend of mine recently did was,

01:47:32.440 | he took all of his biomarkers

01:47:33.900 | from his most recent health tests,

01:47:35.720 | where he went and got all these labs done.

01:47:37.780 | And he was like, talk to me about them.

01:47:39.560 | Here's all of them.

01:47:40.640 | Here's everything about me.

01:47:41.960 | Here's the history.

01:47:43.380 | What can you interpret from this?

01:47:44.920 | - Oh, cool.

01:47:45.760 | - It didn't even cross my mind to take my blood labs

01:47:48.760 | and put them into chat GPT and see what it said.

01:47:50.900 | - And there's lots of use cases you'll find as a parent

01:47:52.920 | where you're like, oh, make up a story

01:47:54.000 | about a dragon who likes fish tacos,

01:47:55.960 | because that's what my child wants to talk about.

01:47:58.240 | So you'll get to there.

01:47:59.600 | But I've started trying to think about, okay,

01:48:02.040 | it could be used for brainstorming.

01:48:03.320 | It could be used for analyzing stuff.

01:48:05.300 | And as these app stores and plugins get better and better

01:48:08.320 | and it can do stuff, I'm super interested.

01:48:10.720 | Right now I'm like, it's not as good at the doing

01:48:13.520 | as the thinking, but I hope it gets there.

01:48:17.000 | And one tool we didn't talk about,

01:48:18.080 | I don't know how much you use Zapier,

01:48:19.720 | but I would say that is a tool that for the longest time

01:48:23.860 | I looked at is like, how would I use it?

01:48:25.400 | It was almost like an EA.

01:48:26.240 | It was like, how would I use it?

01:48:27.140 | I would never use it.

01:48:27.980 | I would never use it.

01:48:28.800 | And then I adopt it and I've got all of these processes,

01:48:31.260 | like doing all of these things.

01:48:33.180 | Actually the way a friend of mine uses it

01:48:34.520 | is in the beginning of his voice notes,

01:48:36.420 | he just says like a category.

01:48:37.660 | He's like work or food or health.

01:48:40.760 | And then he reads this voice note.

01:48:42.300 | The voice note gets transcribed through whisper memos

01:48:45.180 | or whisper notes and gets sent to a Zapier email,

01:48:49.060 | which looks at the first five words.

01:48:51.620 | And if one of these words is there, categorizes it

01:48:54.260 | and puts it in this place in notion

01:48:56.340 | and loops in the right person and all of those things.

01:48:59.860 | And so it's pretty powerful.

01:49:01.940 | And I feel like I slept on it for too long

01:49:04.440 | thinking it was only a tool for business

01:49:07.260 | and realize there's just an infinite number of ways

01:49:09.940 | that you can loop together personal things.

01:49:11.660 | - For sure.

01:49:12.700 | Yeah, it's funny, the use of AI in a lot of these things

01:49:15.820 | and viewing it as cheating is,

01:49:17.620 | this came up in a conversation,

01:49:18.820 | I think as recently as last week

01:49:20.300 | within our engineering team,

01:49:21.740 | because we were interviewing engineers.

01:49:23.500 | We did a live coding exercise

01:49:25.260 | and I don't know if you've seen CoPilot.

01:49:27.220 | - Yeah.

01:49:28.060 | - But it writes a lot of the code for you.

01:49:30.320 | And we had, basically we discovered last week

01:49:33.340 | that our live coding exercise no longer works

01:49:35.500 | because CoPilot will just give you the answer.

01:49:38.720 | So we weren't sure like, do we make him turn off CoPilot?

01:49:41.780 | And I mentioned to the team, we just need to adapt.

01:49:45.380 | We need to change the expectations.

01:49:46.780 | We need to do adapt our live coding exercise

01:49:48.660 | because I remember when I was interviewing

01:49:50.660 | for programming jobs years ago,

01:49:53.940 | the guy who was interviewing me

01:49:55.100 | was more of an old school engineer.

01:49:57.520 | And he felt like my use of an IDE,

01:49:59.820 | which I think at the time was Atom,

01:50:01.140 | he felt like that was cheating.

01:50:02.380 | So we had to move to a whiteboard to do this whole thing.

01:50:04.740 | It's like, nobody writes actual code on it.

01:50:07.460 | He's like, well, why are you sure that this executes?

01:50:10.180 | It's like, I don't know.

01:50:11.500 | That's what my IDE tells me.

01:50:13.620 | It's mostly right.

01:50:14.580 | If there's any errors, it would tell me.

01:50:16.460 | And you just have to adapt and get used to the tools.

01:50:19.980 | Honestly, I've been back in the code base

01:50:22.340 | for a few months now.

01:50:23.900 | These new tools using GPT-4 and CoPilot,

01:50:27.440 | I'm legitimately double the productivity that I was before.

01:50:31.620 | That's not an exaggeration.

01:50:32.820 | The amount of output, the reduction,

01:50:35.500 | and the number of times I get stuck on things,

01:50:37.600 | I'm legitimately producing twice as much as I was

01:50:40.380 | before all of this stuff was available.

01:50:42.540 | - I'm not an engineer by any means,

01:50:44.160 | but I would say I'm comfortable enough

01:50:46.060 | to figure out what code's trying to do.

01:50:48.700 | And I was like, I have this idea.

01:50:49.740 | I want to build a page on our website

01:50:52.140 | where I can pull in a list of credit cards.

01:50:54.680 | We didn't talk at all about points and miles,

01:50:56.220 | which we don't need to, but I'm a nerd about it.

01:50:58.060 | And I was like, I want to be able to build a place

01:50:59.740 | where we can filter and sort and look at signup bonuses

01:51:03.600 | and reference a table of what points are worth

01:51:06.260 | and determine how much it's worth and all this stuff.

01:51:09.100 | And I literally built a site that does all of this.

01:51:11.700 | And I am 100% sure it was well beyond the scope

01:51:15.560 | of what I was able to do on my own,

01:51:17.920 | because I feel like when it comes to writing JavaScript,

01:51:20.840 | I'm like, nope, I'm not great there.

01:51:22.720 | And I was just blown away.

01:51:24.000 | The one challenge is when something breaks,

01:51:26.280 | 80% of the time, you could be like,

01:51:28.480 | hey, this is how it's broken.

01:51:29.660 | Can you help me?

01:51:30.500 | And then there's like 20% of the time where you're like,

01:51:32.320 | mm, no.

01:51:33.160 | And then you do, but funny enough,

01:51:34.600 | you think that this tool will do the same thing every time.

01:51:37.780 | So I'll revert to where it started working.

01:51:40.360 | I'll copy it into a new chat and say,

01:51:42.460 | hey, I have this thing and it's not working.

01:51:44.500 | And the same tool that couldn't solve it will solve it.

01:51:47.580 | - It will self-reflect when you say,

01:51:50.220 | are you sure that's right?

01:51:51.700 | And it was like, oh, you know what?

01:51:53.300 | - I missed something. - No, I missed something.

01:51:54.780 | Like that is weird.

01:51:55.820 | That is super weird.

01:51:56.940 | (laughs)

01:51:57.860 | Happens all the time.

01:51:59.380 | - So we talked a lot about how tracking what you're doing,

01:52:01.700 | whether it's time is interesting.

01:52:03.540 | I just briefly talked about putting biomarkers into GPT

01:52:06.660 | and what you can learn from them.

01:52:08.420 | We could probably have an entire podcast

01:52:10.420 | that's completely separate from this

01:52:11.820 | about tracking your personal health data

01:52:14.740 | and learning from it.

01:52:16.240 | And you referenced levels a few times.

01:52:18.140 | I mentioned in the intro,

01:52:20.020 | can you just spend a few minutes and talk about

01:52:22.340 | what you can learn from tracking your own health data

01:52:24.900 | and maybe inspire people to dig deeper?

01:52:27.440 | - Yeah, so levels is,

01:52:28.940 | we show you how food affects your health using biosensors,

01:52:32.420 | like a continuous glucose monitor I've went on here.

01:52:34.860 | It's just a patch on your arm.

01:52:36.720 | It shows you what your glucose levels are in real time

01:52:40.300 | and allows you to connect the dots

01:52:42.460 | on how what it is that you're eating

01:52:45.060 | is affecting your health.

01:52:46.420 | For me personally,

01:52:47.260 | it's really just been more lifestyle focused.

01:52:50.420 | I would say for me,

01:52:52.580 | it has allowed me to see what I'm eating throughout the day

01:52:56.540 | and how that impacts my energy levels throughout the day

01:52:59.380 | of am I feeling tired?

01:53:01.460 | Are my hands shaky?

01:53:02.860 | Why am I not able to focus?

01:53:04.220 | Why do I have brain fog?

01:53:06.340 | And you often uncover how many of those things

01:53:08.720 | are just because of what you're eating.

01:53:10.300 | The simplest example that I can give,

01:53:12.100 | which was really my first eye-opening moment

01:53:14.500 | was discovering that my super healthy orange juice

01:53:17.500 | and oatmeal breakfast was actually the source

01:53:20.620 | of most of my problems throughout the day.

01:53:23.140 | And I don't even like oatmeal.

01:53:24.620 | It was just, I felt like I had to do it

01:53:26.820 | because it was healthy

01:53:27.820 | and it was actually causing all of these problems.

01:53:29.980 | So there's nothing like having ground truth data

01:53:33.460 | when you're trying to make feedback loops

01:53:35.380 | on understanding how to improve.

01:53:37.060 | So that's the core of the product.

01:53:38.540 | - Yeah, I mean, I have used the product

01:53:40.360 | on multiple occasions.

01:53:41.540 | And I think the one thing that was the most interesting

01:53:44.060 | beyond just seeing how your body reacts

01:53:46.240 | is doing it with someone else

01:53:47.740 | and seeing that like you're just different.

01:53:50.500 | And so for me, I don't know why,

01:53:53.420 | but a cinnamon roll doesn't really spike my glucose at all.

01:53:56.320 | And my wife, it is through the roof.

01:53:58.460 | You think about a lot of our advice

01:54:00.020 | for health is non-personal.

01:54:02.260 | And so my takeaway from it was

01:54:04.540 | I basically watched everything I ate

01:54:06.260 | and how it affected me in a window of time.

01:54:08.500 | And my wife did the same thing

01:54:10.140 | and both like interestingly and unfortunately,

01:54:12.700 | they were very different.

01:54:14.200 | Which is disappointing 'cause it means

01:54:15.740 | if we wanna target similar behaviors in our body,

01:54:19.480 | we can't eat the same things,

01:54:20.700 | which makes life more complicated.

01:54:22.420 | But it just makes you question,

01:54:23.900 | oh, if someone says this is a definitive health truth,

01:54:26.960 | there are some, but there are also others that aren't.

01:54:30.580 | - For sure, this is a very new field.

01:54:33.020 | We've only been able to measure these things in real time

01:54:35.780 | for single digit years.

01:54:37.580 | And so a lot of the studies,

01:54:38.980 | it's still unknown to science

01:54:40.560 | what normal glucose levels even are.

01:54:43.020 | We're actually running the study now.

01:54:44.420 | It's the largest study of its kind with about 50,000 people

01:54:47.460 | to just establish what normal glucose even is.

01:54:51.820 | Which is hard to believe that we don't know that,

01:54:53.420 | but we don't.

01:54:54.260 | What's interesting about it is that there are so many things

01:54:57.320 | that can impact your health

01:54:58.960 | and how your body responds to this.

01:55:01.040 | And so much of it is still yet to be discovered.

01:55:04.220 | We know that microbiome plays a huge role in this.

01:55:08.060 | There's a lot of really cool studies out of Israel,

01:55:10.060 | I think at Iran Sehgal's lab,

01:55:11.700 | where they knock out the microbiome of mice.

01:55:15.920 | They can effectively replace their microbiome

01:55:18.100 | with that of another mouse.

01:55:19.220 | And they're able to change how those mice respond

01:55:21.700 | to different foods through microbiome transfers.

01:55:24.540 | Sleep has a huge impact.

01:55:26.540 | Hormones have a massive impact

01:55:28.300 | on cycles throughout the month.

01:55:30.740 | How much you exercise has a huge impact.

01:55:33.180 | If you did a huge workout,

01:55:34.260 | if your muscles can absorb a lot of glucose.

01:55:36.820 | There are so many variables that can impact these things.

01:55:39.900 | Genetics play a factor.

01:55:41.160 | So figuring out what is causing all of this,

01:55:43.740 | I think is gonna be a really interesting area of research

01:55:46.580 | over the next 10 to 20 years.

01:55:48.400 | - You started off saying it's about

01:55:49.500 | how food affects your body,

01:55:50.500 | but it's also, sounds a little meta,

01:55:52.160 | but it's like how your body can affect

01:55:53.560 | how your food affects your body.

01:55:54.900 | - Yeah, sure.

01:55:55.900 | - And I know like exercising after eating

01:55:59.420 | can actually change how your body processes food.

01:56:03.180 | You can see it in the data.

01:56:04.900 | And so I guess that's a pitch for walking after you eat.

01:56:08.140 | It doesn't have to be a lot of exercise, right?

01:56:09.780 | - It's a lot less than people think.

01:56:11.140 | You know, just like a short walk after eating,

01:56:13.100 | especially like a high carb meal,

01:56:14.760 | has a measurable impact on how your body responds.

01:56:17.940 | - I'll put a link in the show notes

01:56:19.260 | to where people can go check it out.

01:56:20.700 | I remember it used to be invite only,

01:56:22.100 | but now I think anyone can sign up.

01:56:23.420 | You've obviously optimized a lot of your work life,

01:56:26.420 | the tools you use, everything.

01:56:27.820 | Anything on the personal side?

01:56:29.460 | - Since, you know, this is all the hacks,

01:56:31.220 | I think one hack that is a really useful one

01:56:33.680 | that has helped me a lot,

01:56:35.920 | just stay present throughout the day,

01:56:38.580 | is set alarms for everything.

01:56:41.940 | So the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning,

01:56:44.660 | I look at every meeting that I have throughout the day,

01:56:48.380 | and I set an alarm for when my next action needs to be.

01:56:51.780 | So if I have a 9 a.m. meeting, I set an alarm for 9 a.m.

01:56:55.340 | If I have to leave for the airport at 6 p.m.,

01:56:59.020 | I set an alarm for 6 p.m.

01:57:00.700 | And it has allowed me to, for one, not miss meetings

01:57:04.420 | and not be late to things.

01:57:05.980 | There are a lot of people who just rely

01:57:07.660 | on their Google Calendar alerts,

01:57:10.820 | and they are so inconsistent,

01:57:12.700 | and you end up missing things all the time.

01:57:14.860 | But also it allows you to stay present.

01:57:17.100 | We've all been in meetings where you can see

01:57:18.820 | the person's constantly checking their watch,

01:57:20.580 | like what time is it, do I need to leave right now?

01:57:22.580 | If you have an alarm set, it's gonna go off.

01:57:25.380 | You can just relax.

01:57:26.300 | You don't have to carry that cognitive burden

01:57:28.740 | of what if I'm late, how much time has elapsed,

01:57:31.540 | how much time do I have left?

01:57:33.160 | It'll tell you, it'll be fine.

01:57:34.780 | And so I found that as a tool to just be able

01:57:37.740 | to maintain presence is a really good one.

01:57:40.260 | - That is super interesting.

01:57:41.100 | I've relied on the Google Calendar reminders don't work.

01:57:45.020 | I've actually, the interesting thing about Slack,

01:57:47.140 | so a lot of people, it's like Slack is the worst thing ever.

01:57:49.620 | For all the hacks, our Slack instance

01:57:51.900 | has like three people in it.

01:57:53.460 | So it actually really exists more as a place

01:57:56.220 | to have a bunch of conversations

01:57:57.680 | and find those conversations.

01:57:59.460 | And I'm not sure if there's a better tool for that,

01:58:02.060 | but it means that Slack isn't that noisy.

01:58:04.500 | And so the Google Calendar push to Slack as a DM,

01:58:09.300 | I just have that work,

01:58:11.060 | and it sends me a reminder one minute before.

01:58:13.300 | But I haven't thought about the fact that

01:58:15.860 | in order to guarantee that gets through,

01:58:17.840 | you have to let everything else through.

01:58:19.420 | And the alarm kind of pushes outside of that.

01:58:22.100 | - The thing about Slack or just communication tools broadly,

01:58:25.860 | the fundamental problem that makes communication hard

01:58:29.460 | is that the number of people

01:58:31.180 | in a communication cluster scales linearly.

01:58:34.980 | So you have one person, two people, three people,

01:58:38.060 | it's just linear.

01:58:39.100 | But the number of edges between those nodes

01:58:41.780 | scales polynomially.

01:58:43.440 | So the difference between 10 people and 100 people

01:58:46.980 | is not 10 times more, it's like a thousand times more.

01:58:50.540 | And so those communication pathways,

01:58:52.700 | you very quickly reach a point

01:58:54.740 | where you can no longer keep up with what's going on.

01:58:57.600 | I've talked to some founders who scaled companies

01:59:00.260 | and they say, "You have to treat every doubling

01:59:02.180 | "like it's a different company."

01:59:03.980 | Because primarily this comes from communication pathways,

01:59:08.060 | where it is no longer possible.

01:59:11.020 | At a certain scale, you could spend all of your time,

01:59:14.140 | 100% of the day, just keeping up

01:59:17.020 | with what is happening in the company

01:59:18.540 | and not doing any work.

01:59:20.020 | And it would be really bad for company productivity,

01:59:23.340 | but you could absolutely do it.

01:59:24.300 | That is how much communication is being generated.

01:59:26.380 | So you necessarily have to silo information

01:59:29.420 | and you have to figure out where that signal is.

01:59:31.380 | So it gets much, much harder

01:59:33.500 | once you hit even 20 something people.

01:59:36.040 | - This reminds me,

01:59:37.120 | and I really hope I'm not misattributing someone else,

01:59:40.240 | but I believe it was Bill Gurley,

01:59:42.060 | who is a well-known venture capitalist.

01:59:44.580 | And the idea that he presents

01:59:46.300 | is when something's not working,

01:59:47.260 | you just assume that what you're doing now

01:59:49.100 | isn't the right answer.

01:59:50.540 | And I think it's a principle I've tried to apply

01:59:53.140 | to a lot of aspects of life.

01:59:54.820 | It's like, "Oh, communication is kind of broken.

01:59:57.140 | "Let's just assume we're not gonna keep doing it

01:59:59.240 | "how we're doing it."

02:00:00.080 | It's always so easy to just say like,

02:00:01.400 | "How do we tweak the thing we're doing a little bit?"

02:00:04.080 | But I've now kind of encouraged myself.

02:00:06.500 | It's like, "Oh, if the way we do dinner isn't working,

02:00:09.320 | "let's not try to find easier recipes.

02:00:11.660 | "Let's see if we can outsource who picks our recipes

02:00:14.740 | "or something else."

02:00:15.780 | So I've tried to apply this business principle.

02:00:18.380 | And a lot of what I'm,

02:00:19.660 | because I don't have a job at a company

02:00:21.700 | with lots of employees,

02:00:22.740 | every time I hear you talk about these business ideas,

02:00:24.460 | there's a personal application that I'm processing.

02:00:26.700 | That one was one big one for me,

02:00:28.240 | where it's like, "If it's not working,

02:00:29.140 | "just don't assume you can fix it.

02:00:30.980 | "Maybe assume something else is better."

02:00:32.700 | - For sure.

02:00:33.660 | - This has been fantastic.

02:00:34.760 | I told you before you started that,

02:00:36.780 | "Well, we're not gonna go that long.

02:00:37.960 | "I like to keep it tight."

02:00:38.920 | And there was just too much to cover.

02:00:40.420 | So thank you for sticking around

02:00:41.980 | and going down so many paths.

02:00:43.840 | - For sure.

02:00:44.680 | Thanks for having me.

02:00:45.520 | (upbeat music)

02:00:47.500 | - Wow.

02:00:48.340 | If you made it this far,

02:00:49.160 | then I assume you also enjoyed this conversation

02:00:51.500 | as much as I did.

02:00:52.700 | Sam is amazing.

02:00:54.060 | And I am just so excited to be putting

02:00:55.740 | all of his knowledge to good use.

02:00:57.700 | Again, if you want a copy of the delegation guide

02:01:00.060 | I put together with the team at Oceans,

02:01:01.720 | you can find it at allthehacks.com/delegate.

02:01:05.700 | And if you wanna check out Oceans

02:01:07.740 | or look into finding your own assistant with them,

02:01:10.140 | they're at oceansxyz.com.

02:01:12.780 | Feel free to let them know I sent you

02:01:14.380 | and I'm pretty sure you'll get hooked up with a deal.

02:01:16.780 | Okay, this was a long one.

02:01:18.540 | So that's it for this week.

02:01:19.840 | I'll see you next week.

02:01:20.940 | (upbeat music)

02:01:23.520 | I wanna tell you about another podcast I love

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