(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. If you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins. I'm a diehard optimizer who loves doing all the research to help you get the best experience in life. And one of those things is managing time.

And time management guru, Laura Vanderkam, who I've had on the show before, has a new book called Tranquility by Tuesday. I thought it was a good book that offered nine rules to help people spend more time on what matters. But there was one expression in the book that really stuck out with me.

We should all be time millionaires. And that sounds great. Even better than being a money millionaire, maybe. But how does it happen? People can't just create more time in their day unlike money, so what's the secret? And that's where today's guest can help. His name's Dan Martell. He's a good longtime friend of mine, and he has a new book about just this.

It's called Buy Back Your Time, Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire. In his years as a successful entrepreneur, after a rough childhood and a few run-ins with the law, he built five companies, sold three of them, and currently runs SaaS Academy, the world's largest coaching program for founders of software-as-a-service businesses.

But you don't have to have founded a business to apply these principles. We're gonna talk about why buying back time has become his superpower, why mindset is such a key part of buying back time, how anyone can learn from super successful people like Oprah or Richard Branson about how they've increased their productivity, and more importantly, their fulfillment in life.

We wanna talk also about how you can create a playbook at work or home to codify how you do something, and also to help someone else do it for you. We'll also touch on why almost everyone should consider hiring some type of administrative assistant, and how Dan uses a house manager to take care of nearly every aspect of his family's life, and ways that you can start to implement pieces of that in your own.

There'll probably be a lot more, so let's get started right after this. Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. - Chris, it's an honor. I'm super excited. This is the podcast I've been wanting to do for a long time, just 'cause I know your audience is nerdy as much as I am on this topic.

- I want to start letting people know who's coming on to get questions, 'cause I'm sure people listening now would have great things. So that's something I might kick off in 2023. But I wanna jump right in. Saving time, freeing it up, buying it back with help from others is your superpower.

We've talked about this before, both in work and life. I wanna hear how you got so good at it, because it's something that so many people struggle with, and also why you think it's so important that people start doing it, no matter where they are in their stage of life.

- I learned this the hard way. I've been a business builder, tried to be an entrepreneur growing up, failed for seven years, just tried. And when I was 24, I found a different gear. Sounds crazy, but I read my first business book, turned out to be a good move.

And then I actually hired a business coach this guy named Bob, he was an E-Myth certified coach. And Bob taught me a lot about business. And when I was 24, I started this company called Spheric. But what happened for me is over a four-year period, even though we grew a lot, we became a multi-million dollar company within a couple of years and grew to about 40 employees and won a bunch of awards, I just got really good at being productive.

I didn't understand how to think of time and energy and just how I was showing up as a brother and a son and partner in life and as a friend. And what happened was, is I was working at the office on a Sunday morning and I was supposed to be back around 11 o'clock.

I was engaged to a woman at the time and we had just bought a house. And before I knew it, it was two o'clock in the afternoon. And I was like, ran home and walked into the house and I found my fiance in tears and she just was beside herself.

And she just looks at me and decides that was that. And she just goes, "I can't do this anymore." And takes the ring off and drops it on the counter. And she walked out and seven weeks before our wedding, my life just shattered. 'Cause I think anybody that's done anything from working hard at their job to taking risk in a business, they don't do it really for themselves.

I was doing it for her. I was doing it for our future, our lives that we were gonna build together. And that was when I had to like look in the mirror and ask myself, there's gotta be a different way to approach time because there was a six month period, Chris, that I actually thought that because I'm so driven in life and I was so horrible, I would go to birthday parties and bring my laptop.

And that was normal. And I would think to myself, I'm the best friend ever 'cause I'm so busy that I showed up and I'd sit in the living room on a laptop while everybody else was enjoying music and partying. And it was just crazy. That was the moment where I started reading books around leadership and personal development.

Really diving into that component of it. And I just realized that it's not just about being super productive, even though I think I've gotten world-class at that. I've read all the productivity books. It's really about understanding how your energy flows throughout your calendar and your week and your month and your quarter and all these things so that you can show up to the work or the people in a completely different way.

And that's why I wrote this book. It's just become such a foundational part of my life that if we fast forward to today, I have two incredible kids. I have dinner with them every night. I do quarterly retreats with my wife. We go to seminars, personal development programs together.

I think I did 12 weeks of vacation this year. And I'm the CEO of two eight-figure companies where I wake up and push things forward. And there was no way that I could have done that if I didn't go through that painful moment to force me to learn the lessons that I share with people today.

- Well, it sucks that you went through it, but I know that you're now in a good place and I'm fortunate that you've learned those lessons so you can share them with us. Where do you think people start with this? When I just heard you describe all of the stuff that you're doing now, my head kind of doesn't know how to compute it.

I'm like, well, I just have this one small little thing that's a podcast. It's not the eight-figure company. It's just one of them. I don't have that much vacation. My wife and I don't go on these retreats. So it just seems impossible. - It kind of is. I forgot to mention, I also did three Ironmans this year.

So it's kind of nuts, but Chris, we don't start there. That's not where I started. I think that the big thing for people to understand is that their calendar is telling them a story of what's important to them. And I tell this to people all the time. It's like, if you show me your calendar, I will tell you what is important to you, not what you tell me is important to you.

I work with a lot of at-risk youth and I just even do the same process with them is we do a calendar audit. We look at what I call a time and energy audit of where are you actually spending your time and allocating that, and try to create a life that's by design, not by default.

That's like a first principle. I can teach you all the ways to get more time, but if you don't at least admit to yourself that, "Hey, you have to be a little bit more proactive. "You gotta be a planner. "You need to look at your time and assess "and have a period of reflection," to ask yourself like, "Was this a good use of my time?

"Did it deliver not only the success impact "that I would like it to have in my career "or with my friends, but did it also bring the joy?" One thing I do every year at the end is I look at my previous 12-month period and I look at all the things I said yes to and I did.

And then I go like, "Okay, what were the best experiences?" And then I go, "Okay, what's true about those ones?" And one example in my life is I don't go on vacation unless there's a physical component to what I'm doing. I've had people like, "Hey, come to Europe "and let's go drive supercars." I'm like, "Meh, what else?

"Are we gonna go hike a mountain? "Are we gonna do a three-day bike trip?" I just had this feedback loop. And that's for me. For other people, they're like, "I have no interest in doing that, "but riding around in supercars in Europe sounds fun. "Let me do that." I'm just saying if we don't have a process of reflection, then there's no way you can be proactive and that's where it starts.

It's with the calendar and it's not just a productivity thing, it's an energy thing. 'Cause this is the cool part, Chris. I learned that the energy that I bring to the work can have a three to four times increase in output. What do I mean by this? Well, before I start doing a creative project, I'm full of self-doubt and frustration and anxiety and all these negative beliefs and I'm in low energy.

The thing I'm creating literally has an impact. It's so funny because I see that where it's like, "Okay, if you're organizing an event "and one of the tasks for you to do "is to go and recruit sponsors, "if you just got in a fight with your better half "because you forgot to do something, "that energy shows up in the emails, "it shows up in your language, "it shows up in your body." And it's just so fascinating that people don't consider that.

So for me, I'm always looking at the work I do and I just use a green highlighter and a red highlighter. It's like, this gives me energy and this takes my energy. And as much as I can, I try to remove the things that take my energy so that I'm stacking this positive energy flow to the work because it literally will have a two, three, four times amplifier to the outcome I'm after.

I'm sure there are things, especially for anyone listening who has a job and they're not the boss, that just take the energy out. Are there certain places or times a day where you put those things? Yeah, I think everybody's different. I think, Chris, maybe you can relate to this with the new family.

Before I had kids versus after I had kids, I used to be somebody that was more of a night owl and then I would start my day later and that was okay. Maybe I would get to work and I would jump into meetings and then do some more creative work in the afternoon.

And then what happened is once I had these human alarm clocks, my two sons, and they're 11 months apart, it was bananas, which was another forcing function to get really good at the stuff I talk about. What I do now is I do all of my creative work in the morning and maybe if your boss tells you what to do with your time, but I know my team, we focus on outcomes.

We don't tell people like what they should do. Sure, there's meetings they have to be at, but they're responsible for their own calendar. So if you can design it, the energy flows. Like what works good for me is all my creative work I do in the mornings. I try to push out any in-person conversations till later on.

I personally like to work out at lunch because it creates a reset. And then I bring that reset energy into the afternoon conversations. And then I batch. There's so much stuff we can talk about around like just getting more out of the time we have. So it's so funny 'cause like a lot of times I'm like managing my leaders and they're talking to me, you know, I'm overwhelmed.

I don't have this and this. And then we do a time and energy audit with their calendar. And it's really just about negotiating like constraints in an interface. Like a lot of people have the ability to call somebody up and say, "Hey, I know we have this meeting every Tuesday at nine.

Is there any way we can move it to 11am?" Because it's the only thing that's breaking up my morning. And if I had an extra hour and a half and uninterrupted not broken up time to work on like some creative projects, I really think I'd be more effective. Most people would be like, "Yeah, it actually doesn't change my life.

And if that's gonna support you, like game on." So I just think like trying to understand how you like to work. And then the key is to honor the calendar. It's like, I know what my week looks like and I review my calendar the night before and try to tweak anything that needs to be there.

And then when it shows up, like I put my work in the calendar, even if there's nobody else involved. Like I literally, my to-do list is in my calendar and I just honor what I put in there. I think too often people drag their feet, spend a little too much time on TikTok or Instagram, whatever.

And then that thing that they had an hour blocked out of, it's really 35 minutes and they're rushing through it. So there's that. But if you have the discipline and you're proactive, then I think that energy management flow is actually more productive than just saying I'm managing my time and I'm being productive in my time.

And that's what shifted for me after my fiance left me and I had to rebuild my life was now I structure things so that when I transition in between meetings, I can be 100% present. Because before I was just dealing with like arguments and friction and what I call emotional shrapnel that often I was creating myself.

If you're not a planner, one of my best friends, amazing human being, but gosh darn it, this guy is so forgetful and not a planner. The amount of times that I've seen him lose like two or three hours, I seen him drive eight hours to go pick something up because he'd forgotten he needed it the next day for something.

And I just think to myself like, man, if he just spent a little bit more time measuring twice, cutting once, he would get back like two months of his year. He would pull forward two months of productivity into his calendar year for like a fraction of the time invested.

So again, it's emotional shrapnel, it's self-inflicted. You're literally throwing hand grenades off in your life. And then you're dealing with the fallout of it just because you just haven't built that skill set and that discipline of being a little bit more disciplined. - So two things. One, I encourage anytime I have a meeting that gets invited to me, especially if it's a recurring meeting at work, I guess technically I'm not at a company anymore, but when I was, if they didn't select the let guests modify events button in Google Calendar or I'm sure on whatever calendaring system, I immediately follow up and I say, hey, I know this meeting is not for a couple of weeks or can you enable this feature?

And I had it enabled by default. So I'd encourage everyone to make calendaring easier to just ask everyone to enable that feature on any recurring meeting so that you have the ability to move it without having to say, hey, can we move it? Now we gotta go back and forth spending on Slack or email, just enable that.

So that's one. Two, you talk a lot about discipline, but let's talk about what happens when I sit down and I've got 30 minutes blocked off to go plan the next episode I'm gonna do and there's a million other little tiny things on a to-do list that I could go try to knock off that seem easier to make progress on.

How does that discipline work for you? What makes that possible? - I think what's unique if you watch the way I work is I actually take all those projects or things that are in my calendar and I break down the tasks of the work I'm gonna do in the calendar description.

So everything that is creative output that I need to do, and I'm literally looking at like 17 projects I'm working on, they already have the mini tasks inside of it broken down because most people procrastinate 'cause they don't have clarity as to what the next action item. So if the thing says 60 minutes to go recruit sponsors for event or some play or whatever it is, and in it, it's like send five emails.

Like you're literally that descriptive. You're like send five emails to this person, call John, ask him about this. I write it all down and kind of go, I would say 120% of what would need to happen for the goal to achieve. So like I always like try to like give myself a little bit more tasks to do.

That way if I don't get to it or if I do get to it, it's just it increases the probability of the thing happening. 'Cause I coach so many CEOs, we do these calendar audits. And I'm like, "Why didn't you do that?" And they're like, "The truth was, I didn't actually know what I needed to do." And it's like, "Cool, here's what we're gonna change." Not when you gotta do the work, but as you plan your week.

So for me, I do them on Sunday nights. And I know a lot of people are like, "Look, you're asking me to work Sunday." It's like, "You can do it Monday morning if you want." But Sunday night, I look at my projects and I grab the big rocks and I put them in, for me, my mornings.

And I put them into typically 90 minute blocks. Like that's about as long as I wanna work on one project for until I kinda get bored with it. And I outline in that 90 minute blocks all the stuff I'm gonna do. And I just keep a note file and I just copy and paste it.

And I work through that list. So like Monday, I might attack it. Tuesday, I'll attack it. Wednesday, I'll attack it. And I'm just working through that list. I'll literally, as I get done that 90 minute block, I'll just like edit it for the next day. 'Cause it's shorter, 'cause I got a bunch of stuff done.

And then that way, when I sit down, there's no procrastination because like you said, Chris, it's like, I know I have this other to-do list that I can go get some wins on. But technically, your big project is a to-do list. And if you just break it down, then you just attack that one and you can get some wins so you can build momentum.

'Cause I always got frustrated in software development land that I grew up in. Dude, it would take like months to write code to get a product built. Whereas this other guy who works in construction, he literally sees every day when he's done the progress he made. And it feels so good.

I know that when I was helping my dad growing up, build a deck or redo a roof or whatever, felt so good to make these small wins. That's how I've set up my life. Is I just wanna take the bigger outcome, break it down into projects, break those down into tasks, put it in my calendar.

And then I just follow and I honor it. And look, if I get the wrong list and I like get some feedback, it's like, oh, I thought I would do this and that didn't work. Next time I just change it. But it just allows you to build momentum with your day.

And I think that's what a lot of people are missing out of. It's the lack of clarity. People procrastinate 'cause they don't have clear, like, boom, this is what I gotta go do. One, it's 15 minutes, let's go get it done. Let's go get a small win. Let's build some momentum.

And then that momentum becomes almost addictive. Like I just get excited about how much can I get done in a period of time and how can I look for leverage? - Leverage is gonna be a bulk of this discussion. But before, I wanna know, do you keep a separate to-do list or is the calendar the to-do list?

- I keep a to-do list. I kind of have like a high level Google Doc, okay? It's called to-dos. And what's unique about it, and this is how I'm able to unplug at the end of the day. Now I'm blessed to have an executive assistant that manages 99% of my inbox.

But things that do end up in my world, what I do at the end of the day is I take anything. That's why I like the world we live in where it's all linkable. Anything that I need to process the next day, I put it in the to-do list and I link to the email.

So it's literally, it'll say like reply to Chris or whatever it is. And I link to the email on my Gmail, and then I put it in the Google Doc, and then I grab, let's say the five or six that are there, and I put it in my calendar the next morning for a 60-minute block.

And it'll just say like process to-dos. And that way again, like this is how I want it defined and easy. So I open the calendar and I just open up all my tabs. I just like open up just those emails. See, that's where a lot of people get stuck.

They open up their inbox and then it's like, burp, burp, burp, all these things they gotta do. I just open up the tabs to the thing. It could be like review a copy for a blog post. It's like a link just to the thing. And when I'm done, I close the tab.

So I create almost like momentum I'm building 'cause I like start on the left side and I work through them to prioritize. And it's either emails or projects or creative stuff or like some mirror document I gotta prove or look at. And then because I put it in that Google Doc at the end of my day, like at the very end of my day, that's the last thing I do is I look at my inbox, I look at my projects list, I move them into the to-do, copy paste them, put it in my calendar.

Dude, I sleep like a champ. Like I don't wanna brag, but I use Oura Ring. I'm literally gonna pull up my Oura score right now 'cause people see me wake up so early and they're like, "When do you sleep?" I got an 88 yesterday, which is a pretty beefy score.

I don't toss and turn. My brain doesn't worry about forgetting stuff because I've locked and loaded it into my life and my calendar. So that's like the to-do list of Google Doc. And what's unique is at the top of it, I have all my 25-year vision stuff and five years and one year.

I'm a little crazy like that. I don't worry about the how, but I do know what I'm trying to accomplish. Like I wrote down that I wrote this book six years ago. I wrote down best-selling book, business category, and I stared at it for this long until two and a half years ago, we started working on the project.

But that way I'm looking at like the big vision stuff, 25 years from now, 10 years, five years, one year. And then my to-do and my calendar has to map. I've gotta be able to see what I'm doing this week and how it drives to those outcomes. Specifically, like you label them to it or just because it's at the top of the dock, it's a constant reminder.

Because it's at the top and I scan it every morning as part of my process. So before I work on any of the to-dos, I just read through them. It's almost like it ramps up into my mind. It's like, "Oh yeah, don't forget. This is why we're doing it." I have very unique approaches that work for me.

I call it RPM. I always focus on results, then purpose, then the activity. So a lot of people focus on the how. I focus on the what and the why first. Because I've learned a long time ago, the purpose of why I'm doing something actually matters more than the actual outcome that I'm trying to achieve.

They're one in your list that you could walk through those. I can walk you through everything. I'm an open book. Let me go. I have it open right now. So my vision for my life is help a million at-risk youth. So mentor them. So that's a big one. Build the 3 billion multi-generational wealth.

These are big things, but that's where I'm at. And so I can go through those, build a 30 million company, which we're well on our way by 2025. So that's the vision stuff. And then RPM is my different things. So I have my high-speed ventures, $100 million fund. I've got my book.

It literally says right there, buy back books at New York Times bestseller, back-end specific outcomes of those things, my coaching company. Then it breaks down into quarterly projects that I've committed to to achieve these things. So like big vision this year, quarterly projects. And then I have my to-do list.

Oh, and I also have a waiting on. This is another little secret tip that I like, which is I don't worry if people got back to me because if I send something to you, and it's really important, I only put stuff in my waiting on list if it's things that are gonna affect my goals.

But let's say I email you, I'll literally grab that sent email and put it in my waiting on list. And I'll do the same thing where I'll open up all the waiting on, it might be five or six people, and then follow up. So some people use software for that, like follow up, whatever tools, but I just do it that way.

And that way I can visually see it. But it's very simple. It's a Google Doc. For me, it's just superhuman, remind me. If it's a thing I don't care about, I'll archive it. And if it's a thing that I'm like, "No, this is really important. "I want them in two weeks, remind me, "in one week, remind me." I haven't found a good way to merge the to-do list and the email.

'Cause like 50% of my to-do list is email or it lives in my inbox maybe is a better way to frame it. That's why I take it out. I don't want it in the inbox. I think there's tools like Motion is a new one that I've seen Facebook ads about like taking your to-dos and put them in your calendar.

But I just either manually do it or I have my assistant do it because we talk often about like, "Here are my top projects." And I use color coding in my calendar to know if I'm allocating the right amount of time for different projects. So that's another little hack I use.

So if it's like this is like one, two, and three are the most important to me, I can visually look at the color coding we're using in my week to know if I'm allocating the right amount of time to move certain projects forward. Like my book is orange right now.

And in the calendar is pretty orange because it is a top priority for me. Well, I'm excited. I got a chance to read it. I wanna jump into the theme because it's one thing to be productive. I've talked about it a little bit. I love hearing the way you think about your time management, but time's a limited resource.

And one of the only ways to get it back is to try to find ways to outsource what you're doing so that you have more time to do what you want. So let's talk about it. I know one of the things that I wanna start with is around mindset.

You bring up mindset a lot, especially when it comes to buying back your time. So maybe let's just talk about a few of the objections I think some people hear or think of when they think about this concept, which is like, "Well, I don't have the time "to go find someone to help me with all these things.

"I don't have the money to spend on this, "and no one can really do it like I can." So are there other big ones? Or how do you think about all the objections people have before we jump into the tactics? So those are the top three, and we can kind of overcome those beliefs.

The other one that comes up often that is unexpressed, but is underneath the surface is, "I don't feel worthy." And that one, I coach not a lot, but I've coached especially women CEOs, and they seem to struggle with it a bit more. And the language that I hear is, "I just feel guilty that I can't run my company "and take care of my household." Or like, "I'm worried what my mom is gonna say, "or my mother-in-law, or like my neighbor." It's really fascinating to hear that.

But the truth is everybody's got their own limiting beliefs about the world that's gonna stop them from achieving more. It doesn't matter if it's like getting more time back or being successful in your career, you have to understand that your beliefs about how the world works and how we respond is what's stopping us.

The one of like, "I don't have time." Well, you decide what you do with your time. Change the language to, "I choose not to make time for this." As soon as you change the language from, "I don't have time," to, "I choose not to make time," that's an honest conversation that you can then address.

But most people will blame an external factor and say, "Oh, I just don't have time for that." It's like, no, you do. If we looked at your calendar and I asked you, "Tell me what you did yesterday," there'll be things that you chose to do instead of working on this problem.

So let's talk about why you're choosing not to do it. So that's the first thing. And by the way, you can apply that to so many different aspects. I was talking to someone the other day, I was like, "God, I would love to lose 10 pounds." I was like, "Would you really?" 'Cause like losing 10 pounds is not some mythical thing that is really hard to figure out.

Like a combination of diet and exercise- It's called caloric deficit over time. Yeah, so like you can do it. So don't say that you would love to do it because say, "I wish I had the time to do it." Well, not even that. How about, "I don't wanna prioritize it right now." It's not important.

'Cause if it was important, you could just do it. I still catch myself up in this, it's hard to get over it. Like I feel like just as humans we're trained this way, but yeah, you do have time. Just how do you wanna prioritize your time? What's important to you right now?

And if it's not, that's okay, but just be honest with yourself. It's on that line. I was coaching a client, Carrie, and she was complaining about like, "I don't have time to go to the gym." It's like, she knew what she needed to do. And then it's like, then we talked about it.

It's like you said, it's like, you're choosing not to do it. You know the benefit of it. There's some friction there. There's a blockers we need to work through. And once we work through it, then it was like, okay. And it's this language of even I get to versus I have to.

I really think that like a rich life, it's not about money, but let's just call it like a rich life versus a poor life. A rich life is somebody that wakes up saying, "I get to do this." Whereas a poor life is somebody wakes up and says, "I have to do this." And it's such a subtle thing, but it will literally transform your life.

If you say like, "I get to work out. "I get to go to work. "I get to drop my kids off at whatever. "I get to work on this project." These are things that you think are like tough or hard, or I don't want to do it, but it's like, yeah, let's reframe the stuff.

So on the belief, I can't afford it's another one. Here's the way I think about it is every person has the ability to create value with their time. It's why we have jobs. When we start off in life, we trade time for money. Some people create more value in that amount of time, so they get compensated by the market.

And Jim Rohn, he's one of the OG personal development guys back in the day, used to talk about this. He goes, "A lot of people don't realize "is that the market is a value rewarding system. "Whether we like it or not, we live in a capitalist society. "And to the degree that you create value, "you will be rewarded for that.

"And it doesn't matter if you're a business owner "or a team member or CEO." Because he even says the highest paid CEO in the world makes $100 million a year. And that's Tim Cook at Apple. Well, the reason why the board pays him that and he gets that and nobody blinks at it is because he created a trillion dollars worth of value.

So my question to people when they say, "Well, I can't afford it." I want to ask them, "Well, how can you become more valuable?" Because if we can talk about how you become more valuable to your employer, to your team, to your community, then you start to ask yourself, "Well, now that I know what I can do to become more valuable, "I need to find the time to do it." And that's where the time trading comes into play.

Well, that's what the best people in the world at is they're just good traders of time. So you start off as time for money, and you'll do that for a while until hopefully you're getting paid a lot more because you're becoming more valuable. But then at some point, it doesn't matter if you're a business owner or not, you got to get good at trading money for time.

That's level two, okay? And I talk about this in the book. Level three is where I want everybody to eventually get is where you start trading money for money, right? This is the investing side. These are skillsets. These are beliefs. These are strategies. You have to develop them. But that is the path of life.

And nobody shared this with me my whole life until one day I realized it's like, "Oh yeah, we start off everybody. "We start off trading time for money. "And then if we get smart and more valuable, "then we trade money for time. "And then if that works out really well "and we get good at that, "then we have an excess or overcapacity of capital "to then invest to have our money work for us." And that's freedom.

And that's what people are after. They're like, "Hey, I want to show up every day "and I want to create an outcome "so that one day I don't have to work. "I can decide if I want to work." I get to, it's not a mindset thing. It's actually like a reality.

And that's where I think life gets really interesting when you wake up and you get to decide what you want to create on. But it starts by just becoming more valuable so that you have the resources to be able to buy back more time to then become more valuable again to the market.

And then there's the, "Nobody can do it better than me, Chris." My role is 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome. And I just think we got to reduce our expectations. My wife, we were talking about this yesterday because she's like, "You're so good "at not worrying if the person "gets it right the first time." And I go, "Well, I can tell you where that comes from.

"Thousands of hours of being let down." And realizing that if I expect every person that I bring into my life to know everything I know and do everything the way I think I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna live a life of being disappointed. And instead, the way I look is I reframe it and I just say, "80% done by somebody else "is 100% freaking awesome." If I have somebody else go to the grocery store for me and bring me my food to my house, and yes, every once in a while, they got the wrong bananas or whatever, I didn't have to do it.

And I'm really grateful that I got to take that time to go work on something creative or spend time with people I love or whatever. And it just changes the expectation. That's where when we start working on these beliefs, then it frees us up to actually invite other people to support us and use these tools to get more productive, to get more done.

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Again, that's longangle, A-N-G-L-E.com. I wanna go briefly back to the money one because I know that it's the one that I struggled with the most, and I'm guessing maybe there's some people out here that are feeling the same way, which is it's not that you necessarily don't have the money, it's that it just feels irresponsible maybe, or if I were to watch a movie and then I'm like, well, I should pay someone to go do this thing, but like I had the time, I just watched this movie.

So how do you help people value their time? I always have them start simple. And the truth is that they need to understand what their time's worth. And the math equation is pretty straightforward. It's whatever you get paid annually to do a job, right? So you make, let's say 100,000 a year, it's simple math.

And then you divide it by 2000, right? That's the amount of value of your hour. That works out to about $50. My rule, and I call it the buyback rate, is if you can pay somebody else to do whatever you're doing for a quarter, like 1/4 of that amount, $12.50 in that circumstance, then you should.

When you start using that filter in your personal life from laundry service, to house cleaning, to Uber Eats, to a lot of stuff, you can start buying back that time. Now, I also don't think you should buy back your time to hang out on a beach or watch Netflix.

I think you should ask yourself, again, it's that time trade. It's how do we become more valuable to the market? And I also agree you should relax and enjoy yourself and recharge. So I'm not saying you become a workaholic, but if you constrain yourself to say, "Look, I'm only going to invest 40 hours a week "in my career." So you hard block it and you create this constraint.

Then you go, "Okay, well, right now, "if I do a time and energy audit on my calendar, "I'm spending time on things that are taking my energy "and very low cost to pay somebody else to do." And then you attack that list of those items and you just start trying to bring support.

And then the key is go do things that make you more money. And it only fits into one of two things. You're either doing more of the thing you're going to get paid more to do right now. So it's a lot easier, obviously, if you're in a role like sales or there's some performance component of the thing you do, but you can negotiate that with your employer.

Like I have half my team on some level of performance compensation. So they have a clear target that if they hit, they get financially rewarded for it 'cause that means everybody wins. And then do more of that. Like learn what that is or negotiate it with your employer and then free up your time.

And I'll give you a real example. This guy, Wendell, who worked for me in sales, he was making a quarter million a year, which is a lot and I get it. But what he decided to do on his own time, because he started to see like, hey, I'm on calls 30 hours a week on calls and then follow up and all this stuff.

He was listening to me coach my clients 'cause like a lot of stuff we do is public inside of our company, not what our client shares, but me, I like record everything I do and just give it away to the team and put on social media. And he hired his own assistant to literally do all of his follow-up, do his prospecting, manage his calendar, manage his inbox so that he could just do more calls 'cause that's how he made more money.

So all of a sudden he doubles his output. Then he has a surplus and he calls me out one day, he's like, I don't know what to do all this money. I'm like, well, congratulations. This is a very good problem to have, like, well done, sir. And I tell him to go into real estate.

He's like, well, how do I do that? I go, that's you to figure out. Like, this is the thing is you free up your time to then fill it with learning new skills that are valuable. So he went into real estate and he hired a mentor. This is what I teach people, like go find somebody that's done it before, bring that person in your life.

And now what's crazy is he only does sales Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, because on Friday, his assistant is queuing up all of the showings for him to go look at new real estate deals. He's already bought, I think he's on his fifth building. He owns like 20 some doors or whatever it's called.

And like, he's doing really well because he's thought through this math. And I know a lot of people are like, well, that's easy. He's making a quarter million dollar a year. It doesn't matter if you're making 50,000 a year or 100, you got to learn how to free up your time to then invest it in things that your employer is going to value or at least the market's going to value.

And then if you want to go chill out and watch Netflix, that's fine. It's just, if you're during the day and during the day, you could do something to progress your career or you take an hour to drive to go get your food. And instead you could just have the food delivered to you.

So you could not have to take an hour to go do that. That sounds like a great trade. You just need to know ahead of time when I'm buying back that time, I'm going to invest it. I'm going to fill it with things that will compound and create more value in the future.

So there has to be trust. You have to have sat down and thought about this and have a plan and you just keep working through it. So I just tell people to allocate a budget, right, Chris? It could be very simple, $500 a month. Just take $500 and do the time and energy audit on your calendar and say, I'm just going to give myself permission to buy back maybe less, let's call it $100 a month.

I don't know what it is. And then if I buy back that time, I'm going to do this with that time that I think over a period of time will be more valuable. It could be going to the gym. 'Cause I know for me, man, I show up way different if I worked out today than if I don't.

And that has a huge positive impact on the outcomes that I get to achieve. So that's just the way I think about it. So let's talk about some of those things that you think people can get started buying back. You gave some examples that I think are well-known like ordering your groceries online or getting food delivered.

Great uses of trading dollars for time, I think, personally. I do have some frustration with the grocery delivery because I felt like early on there were so many misses and poor replacements that if you were like me and you were trying to like plan a dinner out, you'd get the wrong thing.

Now I find that Amazon's inventory management for Amazon Fresh at least in the States is so good that I don't have that fear anymore. So that's a few. What are some of your favorites? There's so many. When I look at like the early days of starting to do this, laundry service, I was crazy busy.

My fiance's pissed off at me. I'm trying to get all my work done. And this is what happened is I literally had to get a laundry service so that I could work on Sundays in the morning. Normally I was done by 11 a.m. That was my rule and I got in trouble that day.

But obviously like just having somebody else take care of your laundry, like wash and fold, game changer, just low-hanging fruit. Having somebody come in maybe once every two weeks, maybe once a week to come in to clean your house, to take care of like the deep cleaning, that kind of stuff, that's a huge opportunity.

Some people are like, "I'm not gonna pay somebody else 25 bucks an hour "to do something I can do myself." All right, well, how about we just get better at getting our time back? How about you start using a calendar? Like that would be a big idea for people.

If we fail to plan, we plan to fail. I don't know who said it, but like, I remember my wife's friend, she said that because she was just so frustrated with herself about the amount of wasted time running around your kids. And I forgot this happened and that. And it's like, people don't realize how much time is wasted in just the commute.

So even just asking yourself like, "Are you driving to Costco?" "Yes." "Why don't you just order online?" "Well, I like to go to Costco." "I know you like to go to Costco, "but if you tell me you like to go there "and you don't have enough time to go to the gym, "then you're making a decision to go to Costco "because you like it versus go to the gym, "which you know will have a compounding effect." Especially with the health.

When you're healthy, you have like 1,000 goals and dreams. And when you're not, you have one. And I bring that one up because if that's not front and center for a lot of people, it should be the driving force behind everything we're talking about today. Because it will have the biggest impact on your life, your mental health, your physical health, worry your family will have for you.

If you don't want your family to worry, that's all parents want. They want to know you're happy and healthy. That's a big one. One of the things is, again, when it comes to scheduling, it's everything from like cutting down on meetings, saying no, inviting people to you. That's a big one.

So for example, I don't do the got a second meetings, coffee meetings, et cetera. Chris, and I'm sure you don't either 'cause like I can buy myself coffee. What I do instead is every Tuesday morning, I hike this mountain near my house. And it's an open invite for anybody that wants to pick my brain or hang out with me to come and do the hike with me.

And I've been doing it now since I moved to this new city, we live in Kelowna, BC for two years. So every Tuesday morning, 6.30 AM, if you want to come hang out with me, anybody, and this is an open invite for your audience. If they want to fly to Kelowna and pick my brain, I will be there.

I call it net time, no extra time. I compress all these other meetings into one experience. And usually like it's a half hour hike up and then 15 down. It allows me to have like great conversations. It allows me to get my workout in. So like that's a big time-saving one.

Even considering using like carpooling or public transit, and I'll tell you why, is a lot of people can do stuff if they're not driving. A lot of people don't understand that taking the public transit, the train... I know in San Francisco, I used to use a car service. Uber, actually funny enough.

So Travis, who started Uber, was an investor in my company, Flowtown. And when it came out, I was like using it for next level stuff. I remember Travis saying to me, he's like, "You're the only person..." I would send Ubers to go pick up my girlfriend at the time to bring her to the date, to save me time.

I would use it as almost like a delivery system of people to bring them to me to save me time. Now that's an advanced thing. People aren't gonna be doing this, but that's one for sure. And then there's just a bunch of apps. - When you say that, like now they've built in the delivery function.

But I remember one time, little things like, I recorded the interview in person and the SD card didn't work. And there's like a data recovery company in San Francisco. And I was like, well, I'll just send the SD card to the company on an Uber instead of drive to the city and drive back.

Using that for delivery, you used to have to like convince the driver to do it. - You had to like talk to them. Yeah, now it's just part of the service. - You're like, "Oh, I left my laptop at this meeting." And you're like, "Hey, do you think you could pick this lap?

I'll have someone bring it out." So yeah, I love that one. - My whole rule, if you had to put it into a list, it's go mobile. I do not use services that don't have a mobile experience. And this is for everything, home automation, security systems, lighting systems, anything that my wife wants to buy that's like an electronic, I ask if they have a mobile app because I want to be integrated into my workflow and just be able to access it wherever I'm at.

That's a big one. The other one is automation. Anywhere that I'm doing the same thing over and over, I look for tools for automation. We do that for lawn care. We do it for locks, lights, cleaning cycles for things, and just services. You know, like having somebody come to your house to clean your car.

That's a real thing. Or like my buddy Brad, his wife was spending every Wednesday afternoon cleaning their cars. And I was like, "Hey dude, you guys have a cleaning lady?" He's like, "Yeah." I go, "Why don't you just ask the cleaning lady to clean the cars?" "Oh, geez, I don't know if we could do that." "Yeah, the woman who's cleaning your house obviously knows how to clean.

She drives a car. Pretty sure she cleans her own car. She probably wants more hours." It's so funny when we just start thinking of things through that lens of like, how do we put things together? And then the no touch side is the third principle. The no touch is kind of what we talked about, like using online, like Costco.

I don't go to grocery stores. I don't buy stuff. My whole rule is to the degree that I am not touching stuff. That's how I want the world to work. My brother, there was a point in his career, he's in the construction industry. He's a home builder and whatnot.

He would probably spend two days a week, like 16 hours in his calendar, just bringing stuff around to people, okay? And this is not complicated stuff. It's just driving. And eventually I said, "You should hire a runner." So some people can't afford to do that. I just want them to think about that.

It's a little work, Chris. I could get somebody to do wash and fold, but I got to bring it to there, okay? But that's that company. There's actually another company that will come to your house and pick it up and do wash and fold. Oh, I didn't even know that.

Yeah, and it's an extra $6. So is the $6 worth you saving 40 minutes there and back? Again, you do the buyback rate. Yes, perfect. Use a different service. Some people are just not willing to ask. I'll give you a real example. Last year, Christmas time, I had my executive team in my hometown.

We did an offsite and I wanted to give them a gift. So I called the store that I wanted to buy all the stuff from. And I said, "Look, I need six gift bags put together, but I need you to deliver it." And they're like, "Well, we don't do that." And I go, "I know you don't do that.

And I totally understand why, but look, we're going to be at this restaurant. And the only way this is going to work is if you guys can put it together, bring it to the restaurant, have them put it behind the counter and just put it on my name. And then when I show up, it's there." And I share that, Chris, because some people just would not even ask to do that.

And I said, "Look, if you need to charge me an extra 10% or whatever, please do it." But I knew the store where their location was and where the restaurant was walking distance. It takes six minutes to just take the bag, bring it over. They get a multi-hundred dollar order.

And I look like I'm super thoughtful and kind because I got them this cool bag that had their names on them. I just think a lot of people just don't even ask. They don't value their time enough to then ask people that have companies and would love more revenue to say like, "Hey, if you could do this and this, I'll pay you more.

You know what your buyback rate is." And a lot of them will just say, "Yes." It's like, "I actually drive by that neighborhood every day when I come home. So yeah, if you want me to drop it off." We did this with meal prep. I remember eight years ago, my wife was freaking out because we have two young kids and I'm working.

I had a venture-backed company. And I was just like, "You don't need to make dinner. I love you and I know you want to make me food. Not going to change my life if you're not the one cooking." And the way we did it is I was at the farmer's market.

There was this guy that we'd buy these frozen meals from. And I was just like, "Hey, would you make these during the week and just drop them off at my house?" And he's like, "Well, we don't really do that." I go, "I know you don't really do that, but maybe you could start and I could be your first customer.

Here's where I live." I've even done it. There was a meat guy I did the exact same thing with that I wanted him to deliver his meat. Like you were saying, you're at a meat store earlier. But he was like, "I don't really do that." And I said, "Well, what if you had six or seven people that you were delivering on at the same time?" And he goes, "Yeah." And I go, "Cool." I just called my neighbors up and said, "Hey, are you guys willing to commit to this level of purchasing from this meat guy?

You guys all know this store and you like it. And if we do it, then he'll deliver it." And they were like, "Wow, you can get them to deliver it?" I'm like, "Yeah, no problem." I'm just a very resourceful, I ask, I'm creative about how I find ways to get my time back.

- It's funny you bring up the meat store. There's this amazing meat store in Millbrae, California, near SFO called Pape Meat. I learned this morning on the plaque on the wall, it's the oldest business in Millbrae. And we needed a particular type of meat, guanciale, which is the meat you use for carbonara, which is what we're gonna make for Christmas Eve dinner.

- Oh, now you're making me hungry. - And if you go to their website, they do not discuss delivery on the website. There's not an easy way to get the meat. However, this is all I had to do. I searched deliver Pape Meat. And this other website, Towne, T-O-W-N-E dot I-O, definitely some kind of startup, delivers for them.

Unfortunately, because it's Friday and I need it tomorrow, and it's the weekend and the holidays, that wasn't an option this day with my poor advanced planning. But in general, I could have had it delivered, not because they did it. And I'm sure if I called, they would have said, "Oh no, but this other website does it for us." So even just this year, "Oh, I need to order this thing.

"Let's just search to see if there is a service "out there that delivers." So I would just say, I now learn that there's this. - Yeah, most people don't search. - Don't assume that because their website doesn't say they deliver, doesn't mean they don't. And obviously for restaurants, there's plenty of apps that we all know about, but there are alternatives like that.

We started using ButcherBox, which delivers actual meat and all kinds of stuff to your house. So we get fresh meat and talking about two different services. Sorry, Pape, we can't buy all my meat. - No, and you're allowed to do that, right? You can use Instacart for certain things and you can use other services for like the weekly reoccurring.

It's really just being open to spending the time to figure it out. I remember my buddy Nick was frustrated 'cause he just bought this thing off some online site, this furniture showed up and then he's like frustrated 'cause he got put together. And he literally was like, "I showed up just to say hi." And I was like, "What are you doing?" 'Cause this guy runs a successful business.

I'm putting together this furniture. I'm like, "Why are you doing it?" He's like, "Oh man, I don't wanna sit down "and try to find the time to do the thing, "to find the person, to hire them. "Like I might as well just do it myself." And I go, "Totally get it.

"In this circumstance, makes sense. "But you need to consider the next time." So yes, the first time you do it, it's work to find a solution, but it's not that time you're actually trying to buy back. It's the dozens of times this year that if you find a handyman or you use TaskRabbit or use whatever service, you find a trusted resource that you can pay to come and do those types of work.

Yeah, it's a little bit more work today, but down the road, then all of a sudden you have this list of resources where it becomes easier and you can even get it scheduled and part of your lifestyle. Even the meal prep, I remember telling, again, I have a house manager, so I know I live a privileged life.

But if it was me, I would have done the same thing. I went and found a nutritionist that partnered with a meal prep company so that they could take care of all of the food prep so that I would hit 99% of my time. I'm hitting my macros, I'm hitting my nutrients, I'm hitting what I need for my health.

So it's like, some people look at that and they go like, I can't believe you're paying $16 a meal. And I'm like, you don't realize how much time I'm saving and the compliance. Like, this is the other thing is know thyself. I don't want decision fatigue by deciding what I have to eat.

I want that taken care of for me so that I know I'm going to be healthy. I know that the meal is made and it's going to hit all the macros that my trainer gave me and all these things. And then that way I can take that decision power or energy and give it to something that's actually required.

It's why you see people like Zuckerberg wear the same clothes or Steve Jobs or all these people. The more you can take the decisions out of your life, then the more energy and time you're going to have to actually create and produce more. And that's another big part that people don't consider when you use these services is just you're freeing up your mental bandwidth.

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To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. - You talk about your house manager. I'd love to understand, just 'cause it's a concept I don't think everyone knows. First, what that person does, and obviously I know it's probably a luxury and a privilege to have that, but I also wanna talk about ways that some of what they do might be things that people could start to put into place with a virtual assistant or something like that.

And for context, I've thought for years about whether I ever was gonna hire a virtual assistant. I've been collecting tasks over the last few months that would've been great opportunities to outsource that any individual one was not big enough for me to say, oh, let's go hire a person so that, for example, one was, we were thinking of doing a gingerbread baking party, like where we'd make a bunch of gingerbread cookies, have people over, and it's like, oh, it'd be really great if someone wants to find a recipe, figure out how to batch it for 30 people, go on Amazon Fresh, order all the ingredients, and have them delivered.

It would probably not take that long, maybe half an hour. I would probably take me even longer 'cause I'm sure I would try to get caught up on what is the absolute best gingerbread recipe, and the average person would probably not spend as much time as I would, so it'd probably save me even more time.

But I wasn't gonna go hire a virtual assistant for that one task, so maybe talk to me about the house manager and whether you think a virtual assistant could take on a lot of that and whether that's something regular people, at the low cost you can get them now should be considering.

- I'll start with the administrative assistant type of task because that's super approachable, right? Like we live in a world where there are services out there, if you search like virtual assistant, task management, et cetera, where you can pay per task or by the hour, the 15 to $20 type range, or hire somebody in another part of the world for $4, $5, $6 an hour.

It is absolutely approachable for every person out there in the world we live in because there's these like companies that have built this technology. The key though is to actually do the calendar audit to find out what are you doing with your time that is more administrative in nature that is repeatable?

'Cause what I want to encourage people to consider is find the cadence of repeatable tasks that you can insert a person into your life, then they're available to do the things you just talked about, Chris. If I have to think of finding another person to do a one-off thing, that feels heavy.

If I already have somebody in my life that's working five hours a week for me, managing research projects or buying stuff online or scheduling my travel or taking information from this system and putting in this system, like every person that has a job probably does some type of work that isn't really rocket science and you could just give to somebody else.

Sometimes it's just collecting data, it's putting stuff in a graph, it's post-production of social media stuff or whatever it is. Then you start with the reoccurring things or the person's part of your life and then you can give them the one-off stuff. The way I've always looked at it and what I teach in my book is I always start with the calendar first because that's where I'm going to start buying back time and in the early days, it's usually task-based.

A lot of the stuff we talked about from lawn service to cleaning, wash and fold, meal prep, project management, it's all task-based and that's okay, you just start there and you have five or six different people doing different types of tasks and then eventually you say, "You know what?

I don't want somebody separate cleaning my car and cleaning my house, I'm just gonna have one person do that." And you kind of consolidate. So if you think at like the lowest level, every person listening to this, start with a budget, challenge yourself to buy back some time and just know that you can have two or three people supporting you in different services or whatever.

And then what happens over time is you realize that there's a communication overhead, a management overhead of managing these things. And that's what happened for us. We had the house cleaner, we had the chef, we had the lawn care people, we had all these different people supporting our home.

And then when I looked at my calendar, because my wife and I both run companies, I realized like there's a lot of work I was doing of just managing stuff. Like I'm talking about going to the DMV and registering cars and calling my insurance company and maintenance on our homes and just transferring vehicles, literally everything, putting boats in storage.

I understand how privileged of a life that I have, but these are things that were still on my plate to do. So on Saturday morning, instead of going mountain biking with my friends or deciding to say yes to putting our kids into soccer, I'm doing all this other stuff.

And sometimes I just wanna recharge. I wanna sit down, I wanna read. I wanna work on supporting our community. My wife and I are very involved in the unhomed community in our city. I'd rather go do that than manage a spreadsheet of making sure that we have the right insurance on all of our assets.

So we got to a place where we just decided to hire somebody that was the CEO of all of our personal stuff. Now, again, I've had an executive assistant for a long time, for almost 10 years, but that person doesn't live in our home and is not in our home and not doing personal stuff.

They're managing the business side of my life. Task purchasing, travels, all that stuff. Inbox calendar. Then we essentially rolled up all of the other stuff to one person. And now we have one person. She's incredible. And we set up a rhythm where every Monday I have lunch with her.

We talk about the week. We talk about the task. We're eating together. So it takes no time for me. Every Wednesday, my wife and I, my executive assistant and her get on a Zoom call. We call it the house meeting. And we review, we have an agenda. We review the projects.

We review what they're working on, the playbooks. And Chris is kind of crazy about it. I have an SOP. I have a playbook, handbook for the Martell family. And in there is... What does that mean? Yeah, walk me through what that looks like. It's awesome. It's everything. It's who are our babysitters.

It's the names of the people. That's the kids, school, principal, contact info, the vet. Think about all the contacts. So that's all in there. All of our preferences, all in there. Size of my shoes, my favorite colors for a T-shirt. It's kind of crazy. Even just the preference file, where I like to sit on a plane, all these things.

Then I never have to make the decision again. You ever register for an event and they ask you the same questions every time? I don't do that anymore. My assistant or my house manager asks us once and then she writes it down. Everything is in a Google document, right?

I think we're moving everything to Notion right now. Even the... So we have a pretty cool sauna that does infrared and salt therapy and all these things. And it's got a procedure for like how to schedule it to turn it on, how to reconnect the red light system. And it's all in the playbook so that if I need to do it because it's a Sunday morning, I literally Google sauna and I find the playbook and I go to the section where it says, reset the red light system.

And I follow seven different steps to reset. Like it's all in there. Logins are all in one password and it's all under the house vault. So it's like, I'm in my backyard and I need to get into a door that's got a lock. We change all of our locks to pins, like an Airbnb.

Why? Mobile. Remember I said that? It's gotta go mobile. So all the locks are all mobile enabled and all the numbers and the codes are all in one password. And it's literally, we've created this kind of like procedure for our life. Again, Chris, I'm sharing this 'cause I wanna inspire people.

I also know I may infuriate people. Like when you show people some of the super cars and a lifestyle and flying, like all this stuff, they can either be inspired by it or they're gonna be like, this guy's a douche. And I totally get it. I'm sharing this to hopefully inspire people that there is ways for you to incorporate this into your personal life that allow you to increase the quality of life you have.

And most importantly, create jobs. A lot of my clients that struggle with this, that don't feel worthy of having somebody to that level of support. I just tell them, look, you can go buy, 'cause this is what they're doing, Chris. They're going and buying the new Mercedes or the new BMW.

I watch them do it all the time. My neighbors, I watch them do it. The new car comes out, they went and bought it, okay? Or you could stop complaining about not having enough time. And instead of buying the new version, just keep the current one for a couple of years, hire somebody to manage your life so that you have the time to recharge or go increase the value in the market to pay three times over the new car.

It's so fascinating for me to watch, even in my world, friends of mine that struggle with their time and yet they don't understand where they're allocating their resources, their money. So pretty much, if it would show up on my wife or my to-do list, it is owned by our house manager, Betty.

And we tell her all the time, you are the CEO of our lives. We do not manage our things. You manage them, you create the playbooks, you take care of schedules and cadences and assets and relationships and all that stuff. And then we just create a reporting structure where we get the information we need on a weekly basis to keep us informed so we feel like nothing's getting dropped.

So it's no different than you would for an executive assistant in your business life. You just do the same thing for your personal life. And it all evolved from having a bunch of individual things. You start small, yes. It's funny, two things came up. One, I've been pushing, there's a company called Trustworthy that I invested in, which is kind of building the family operating system.

And it started as like the central repository of all the information about your life. So here's our house, here's our bank accounts. And if I were ever to pass away, I have my sister and another person set to be able to access it, they know. But now they've started adding things like, for our house, here's our landscaping company, or here's our internet service provider or something.

So they're building a software alternative to Notion or Google Doc for this. I love it, because most people don't know what information they should be collecting. So their coolest thing is when you onboard, they're like, all right, go put in your old tax returns. All of it. Go link your bank accounts.

Here's your insurance policies. And for your benefit, they have a mobile app. So Amy and I know that if we're at the doctor's office and they're like, where's your kid's insurance card? We know, open the Trustworthy app, here's the insurance card. We get pulled over, show me your proof of insurance, open the app, here's our Geico card.

We know where all of the things are. Dude, it's crazy. Think about how much time you're saved. Like the other day, we had our meeting on Wednesday this week and one of the projects was get my wife's passport renewed. Do you know how many of my friends end up at the airport and their passport's expired and they can't go on a trip or miss a speaking gig?

It's bananas. And why? Because they feel like I'm supposed to manage this. It's my life. I need to manage my life. It's like, when you actually give it to somebody else and you say, please treat me like a child, I am okay with that. 'Cause that's literally what I tell her.

I'm like, I want you to just assume that I'm not that intelligent and I want you to track the stuff, everything. And you tell me when it's due or just do it and we'll build a rhythm for communication reporting so that I know, and then that way it's all there.

And like all that stuff you said, like the insurance, your wills, it's essentially like creating, in a high net worth individual, they'll usually have like a family office. You're creating the infrastructure for your own like personal family office for your life. Even having a shared one password vault for your family's wifi logins and other online services is just a good idea.

I feel like you would absolutely love the product. I'm checking it out. I wrote it down, yeah. I'm looking at it right now and it says, renew driver's license. Because I already gave them my driver's license info. It says, trustworthy will alert you 120 days before your driver's license expires.

Renew passport. Trustworthy will alert you nine months before your passport expires. So by putting the information in, you get this reward of like, hey, passport's expiring in nine months. I don't have to think about it anymore. I know that for all of our kids, I'm gonna get an alert nine months before any of those passports expire.

It relieves the mental burden of me having to think about. This is an example of because you're on the journey to try to find ways to buy back your time and you look at like where you've had friction in the past and you found a service like this. So some people might hear about the house manager and go like, that's crazy.

I could never afford that. Think about there's tools out there. 30% of what she does, the software automates it. And I talked about that. It's like automation. I just feel like people need to really challenge themselves to value their time, to go on the journey, to build it. Yeah, it takes work.

I'll actually give a real tactical thing for people if they're still like on the edge and they haven't done it. This guy, Jack Canfield, he wrote a ton of bestselling books, bestselling author, like good dude. He talked about creating this thing called the frustration list, 'cause it's a muscle.

And his argument was most people don't even see frustrations in their world to see opportunities. It's a muscle you have to develop. And his argument was like, as you go through your day in your home, think about things that frustrate you, okay? And just make the list. I'm not asking you to solve the problem, just make a list.

So it might be I'm downstairs working out and I don't have a cable to charge my phone. Literally, just write it down. Like don't have a cable to charge my phone. Or you get in your car and you realize you ran out of gum and you like this certain type of gum and it's not there.

Okay, write it down. Or it's like, you get out of the shower and you don't have a hook for your towel after you dry off. It sounds crazy, Chris, but I want people to do that for like two or three days because two things, one, honor those frustrations and build a muscle and a routine of solving those problems.

Make the list and actually wake up on Saturday morning and say, hey, I'm gonna work through this list and just see if I can be creative about how I solve this stuff. Some of it could be simple, like buy another truck. And even that, it sounds so nuts, dude.

People won't even give themselves permission to own two cable chargers for their iPhone. So there's one next to their bed and one in their office. Like, isn't it weird, Chris, that they're like, yeah, no, I don't deserve that. If anyone listening feels they don't deserve it, I think I have like 20 extra iPhone chargers in my house.

I will gladly send you one. Of course, because you're like, hey, I wanna have the things that I need and I'm willing to pay for extra stuff so that it doesn't become a point of contention because what's worse is if you're in, like I do some backcountry skiing. If I'm in trouble and my phone is dead because I didn't charge it when I should have charged it, that's a bad circumstance.

So I just really wanna encourage people to realize that if it doesn't feel natural to you right now to identify things in your life that you should be trying to buy back your time on, it's a muscle that can be developed by just writing down the things that are frustrating or not optimal.

Some of you guys are like, I love life. That's not a frustration. Look, just in a perfect world, wave a magic wand. If you could live a perfect life and you go through life and everything's awesome, how would it look? Make that list and try to create that. Love it.

We've gone through a lot. However, there are a few random things that I want to touch on before we go. I think next year will be the year that I get started with trying to actually hire someone to help outsource a lot of these tasks. I need to hire a virtual assistant to help me go research the best virtual assistant services.

I'm not ready for someone full-time yet, but there are a few things that as I've listened to you talk and as I've done my homework and just known you, that you've done that I think maybe don't fall exactly perfectly into buying back your time and the conversation we just had, but I think are worth running through because I think people will find a lot of value out of them.

One is on designing your perfect week. One is on thinking about the seven pillars of life and let's start there and then I'll get to the rest. Cool. The perfect week. And I actually have a diagram in my book that I put in there 'cause I wanted people to actually see what that looks like for me.

I think it's on page 141. It's literally the diagram. What's important is to design all the big rocks into your life so that you actually understand that you do have the capacity. A lot of people go like, "I don't have the time." That's cool. Let's talk about that. But let's just start by saying, okay, here's a seven-day template I give people.

They buy the book, they go to the website and I give them the template. Then they make a list of all the important things in their life, like spending time with their kids, going to the gym, their work, their creative stuff, their hobbies or whatever. And then you take that and you put it into the calendar and you like block them in.

The big stuff, it's like go to the gym every day. What time do you wanna go? It's an hour or 90 minutes, put it in there. And what I think people realize if they go through the exercise is there is actually enough time in a week to do everything you want to do.

You just have to now then honor the calendar. And the reason why I encourage all of my coaching clients to do this is because if you have the rhythm of your week designed, then when you hire somebody like a virtual assistant to support you, they know where certain things go so they don't have to bug you.

It actually is not efficient, Chris, if you have somebody that's managing your inbox and your calendar and helping you with scheduling meetings and stuff to have to ask you every time, "Hey, are you okay doing a meeting at three o'clock on Wednesday afternoon?" Versus, "Hey, these are the two hour windows each day that I do meetings.

So if a meeting comes in, just put it there." I'll just give you like an advanced tip on that for a virtual assistant. We do three levels of priority. So I'll sometimes do a P1, P2, P3 in the email reply. A P1 means cancel something to make it happen at priority level.

P2 is make it fit as soon as possible, but don't cancel anything. P3 is within the next two weeks. And P4 is don't rush. If it happens, cool. If it doesn't, no harm, no foul. Even just trying to create these systems and language around how you work with somebody to manage your calendar is important, but it all starts with designing the perfect week.

Does that make sense? Yeah, I was just actually thinking about some way that you could secretly encode that into your email so you reply to someone. Here's how I do it. I leave an email draft and I write it in the draft so she sees it 'cause she's in my inbox.

Ah. Yeah. Yeah, if someone's in your inbox, all my head could think about was like, "Oh, what if I had this secret code where I had a signature and if I end it with an exclamation point?" Looking forward to hanging out. So you could do signature, enter, and put it right at the bottom and nobody even sees it.

Or different, like you're onto the same pattern of the language. So it's like, "Can't wait to meet" means this. "Looking forward to talking soon" means you can add that as a language signature. It was superhuman they have these snippets. So that snippet could be called P1. I know that I just write P1 and then it posts this line that means...

Boom. I love it. The seven pillars of life. Talk about it. Seven pillars of life is a way that I create a feedback loop for myself on how I'm showing up in my life and at least creating a point of reflection to improve it. And the reason why I designed this is a long time ago, I went through a challenging time with my fiance and that didn't work out.

But then I got married and I don't know about you, but people get divorced and it's kind of crazy. And you're just like, "Why do they get divorced? Why are they having challenges in their lives?" And typically it's because there's a fracture and then the fracture lasts for weeks and then months and then eventually a year.

And the fracture ends up creating such a wide divide that they can't repair it. So what I've done is across these seven core pillars, it's actually a bonus chapter. I wasn't even gonna include in the book and my editor was like, "Hey, I really think the seven pillars would be a great tool for everybody to just wrap it all up." And every Friday morning, I sit down for 30 minutes.

It doesn't even take me 30 minutes. It takes me like five or six. But I rate myself out of 10 on these seven pillars. It's a spreadsheet. I've been doing it for years. And the seven categories are health, hobbies, spirituality, friends, love, finance, and mission. And I do those ones because they encompass kind of like how I wanna show up in the world.

Spirituality is important. It doesn't matter if you believe in God or whatever God or the universal consciousness or spirit or energy, whatever it is. Just asking yourself, do you have a relationship? Are you spiritual? Are you meditating? Whatever it is. And just giving yourself a rating on those things.

Finances, like a lot of people, they don't wanna talk about money. They don't pay attention to their money. And then they wonder why they have none. Or like hobbies. People are like, "Oh, hobbies must be nice." It's like, look, all I know is that after I go snowboarding with my buddies, I'm a better dad, I'm a better husband.

I recharge, I connect. I wanna do those things. So what happens is I score myself on those seven pillars. I'll actually give you today's. That's always better real time. So today I scored myself pretty high. I'm having a good time right now. My two lowest scores, one was friends and the other one was hobby.

So here's the bonus one of this. I got an eight and a seven. I always write in the spreadsheet a note on how to fix it. So the hobby one is book snow biking. So I do this crazy thing called snow biking. And then the friends one is low, but the good news is I go snow biking with my friends.

So I'm gonna get a double whammy. And all I did, the action, that's why I give myself 30 minutes to do this. I just made a list of all the dates that I'm free to go snow biking. And then I sent a text message to my five friends that I go snow biking with and says, "Hey guys, can we just schedule one of these days to go snow biking?" And I've accomplished it.

Literally, it's that simple. It's just every week I assess myself on those seven dimensions. I take my two lowest scores. If it's love, 'cause I haven't been there for my wife, it might be, then I set a commitment to take action in the next seven days. And that one might be like schedule a date night, give my wife night off on Monday, let her take a bath, whatever it is.

And because I do that, Chris, I just feel like I get to live a higher quality of life because I'm not trying to fix things because there's a fracture that's been going on way too long around not seeing my friends or not taking care of my health or not focusing on my mission or whatever it is.

And it's been a big part of my life. - I love it. And on the topic of relationships, the last thing I wanted to chat about, you hired a coach to live with you and help the family and build deeper relationships. For those of us who aren't gonna do that right away or it's not in the budget, what lessons did you take away that maybe we could steal from you?

- So many. Her name is Brooke. She is a angel. We've been working with her for three years. I'm just a big fan of like hiring people to increase the caliber of our life in different areas, from fitness to business to our family. We got to the point where Brooke and I, it's fun because she'll have private calls with my wife and she'll have private calls with me and then we'll do a group call.

But it got to a place where I was like, I think there's another level of opportunity, but I think you'd have to like see us instead of hear us. 'Cause you think about it, Chris, it's like explaining to somebody what happened is like you recounting the situation. It was always like their version, your version, and then the truth.

Versus them being in the room, seeing it, and then they get to get their interpretation. So I literally offered to fly her up. She lived in California. She came and lived with us for three days. She like slept in our house, lived in our home, woke up in the morning, watched the morning routine.

So it was really fun to have her get a new level of insight into what all the conversations we were having meant in a real world scenario. The things that I learned personally was she did some incredible work with my wife around reconnecting with her feminine. You'd have to ask my wife about like the impact it had on her, but I got to see it.

She did some dancing when she asked, she invited me. She's like, do you want to do it with us? And I'm like, I'm here to play full out. So 7 a.m. instead of going to the gym, I sat down and I danced with my wife and Brooke and it was pretty crazy, man.

Just like understanding how women's physiology and their feminine side of their connection is just part of it. It's kind of crazy. It's not what men do. Men scream and charge off into war. And again, it's masculine versus feminine. It's not even a gender thing, but that was a big takeaway.

She worked with our kids. So she did some exercises with our kids to understand the way they were building their worldview. And what was important to them. So she made them draw a picture of their family. You kind of see this in therapy sometimes, but then we had some issues, dude.

It was really cool. Like my oldest son had a meltdown. So she got to see how we responded to it and then gave us some cues. She explained to my wife that these things are 100% normal. So it allowed her to feel less guilty about those things happening. If you don't have an external perspective, you sometimes think like, this is the end of the world and I'm such a bad parent because this is happening.

Having an expert come in and say, oh, actually that's super normal. You handled that really well. Here's why. And in the future, if you want a little bit of coaching, do this. For me personally, sounds crazy. I learned that my wife likes to tell me about her day, not because I'm going to have a test at the end of it.

So I have to remember everything, but just because it's her way of decompressing at the end of the day. So this was a huge win for me because I now prompt it. Where before I was scared of it, 'cause I was like, oh my gosh, she's going to sit there and talk for 20 minutes and I don't know, am I supposed to help?

Am I not supposed to help? Why is she telling me all this stuff? And now I go, hey babes, tell me about your day. This is literally the last thing we do every night because Brooke explained to me what was happening and that I'm not going to be tested and I'm not supposed to do anything other than listen.

So I will tell you, it might sound simple for some of you men out there, you will be the best husband in the world if you say, hey babes, tell me about your day. Wow, that sounds tough. Tell me more. Literally that language, tell me more, game changer. So that was big.

And then just really how to show up for your partner. Some like physical things. Like a lot of women, they want to feel safe. They want to feel seen. They want to feel appreciated. That was a big thing. This one that I think my wife really took away is men hate to be criticized.

I don't know if you've ever had your wife criticize you or do it in front of another person. There's certain things that are just like for whatever reason is really challenging. Once she saw it and got some cues on it, it just changed the way we show up in public.

We worked on this, there's a book, I can't remember the name of it. This is another big one and I'll leave on this one is launchings and landings, okay? So she taught us the value of a launching a land. I'm so driven by time as you guys can all hopefully pick up that I'll just like run out the door.

It's like, I'm leaving, going to the gym. I just ran out the door. She said the two most important things you have to get better at as a couple is launchings and landings. Meaning that when you leave, it is a deliberate go find the partner. Hey, I'm leaving now.

I'm going to do this. I will see you when I get back. And then when you land, it's I'm back. Here's what I did. Do you need me for anything? And it might sound crazy. We actually taught it to our kids. Even before I come into my office in the morning, 'cause I have a home office, I go and I do a launch with my kids where I give them little kisses and I tell them about them and say, I'm going to my office now, da, da, da, da, da.

And then we call it a launch. And then when I get back or at the end of the day, if I'm done early, I like go find them and I land with them. I like, hey, I'm done, da, da, da, da. And they actually say like, I'm launching too.

And they'll tell us about them going to do stuff. So I just think it's those little tweaks, right? In life, it's never about like these big moves. It's these one degree, these two degree changes. And then when you follow that trend line over five, 10, 25 years, they have these huge pieces of impact on your life.

- So two things I took away, no Irish exits in the house. That's for parties only. But also I've just learned to get better about communicating. Sometimes there's a person in a relationship that takes the mental burden of everything that has to happen. And if you don't communicate that you're doing something, they feel like it's their responsibility to do it.

So for me, if I don't say, hey, I am still planning on doing X, my wife might assume, oh, maybe you're not gonna do it. - Emotional shrapnel saved. - All right, we went through a lot. We're way over time. I got an advanced copy of the book. So I've already read it, even though by the time anyone listening is listening, it will be out.

I highly recommend, you've got three on your bookshelf. I was like, I'm gonna maybe have a bookshelf in this new studio. Now I need to go get a physical copy. I only read the digital copy. But definitely tell everyone where they can find it, who it's for and everything, and where they can find you.

- Yeah, book is designed for people that obviously wanna become better time trader. It's called "Buy Back Your Time", buybackyourtime.com. It's available on Amazon. If anything I shared today serves you and you end up getting the book or whatnot, I would love, love, love a review on Amazon. I'm working with my team to create a movement around business and executive level performance and just really help people understand how to build a life they don't grow to hate.

That's like my biggest thing, Chris. I just don't want people to go after this achievement lifestyle or this success ladder to just find it leaning against the wrong wall because they just don't know how to think about the energy and the time and just getting more of their life.

So that's why I created it. It's been two and a half years of love and sweat and frustrations and just putting everything into it. Yeah, I'm really proud of the book and the hardcover is cool and I'll tell you why, Chris, if you get a copy, you should get the physical copy.

I actually got my signature. Take the jacket cover off. I designed the whole, like people never see this stuff, but I cared about it and I'm really proud of it. But yeah, buybackyourtime.com. Awesome, and what about you? Where can people find you on the internet? I am on all social media channels, Dan Martell, 2LZmartell.com, my website, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, you name it, I'm there.

I put out content every day. Awesome, thank you so much for being here. Dude, so fun reconnecting, man. Seeing you again, I appreciate the opportunity. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it.

And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm Chris@allthehacks.com or @Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week. (upbeat music) (electronic beeping) (electronic buzzing)