Doing Time Right

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Doing Time Right

Overview

Most of the time, we’re so busy doing the work that we never take a step back to evaluate if we can improve the systems we use to get work done. This is a big mistake.

If you don’t take a step back to evaluate and improve your strategy, you’ll continue to be stuck on the hamster wheel of life.

Remember: productivity is not a goal. It’s a TOOL to achieve more of the results that you want with less time and effort.

The Journey

time is truly your most scarce and valuable resource. It is the most zero-sum asset that you have. If you’re spending time somewhere, you’re not spending it somewhere else.

Having better systems in this area of your life allows you to be more time free and creative in other parts of your life. Saving three hours at work doesn’t mean that you have three more hours to do work. It could mean that, but it could also mean that you have three hours to spend time with your family or that you feel happier and less overwhelmed as you navigate life

Save Hours in Minutes

“Truth is, young creative minds don’t need more ideas, they need to take more responsibility with the ideas they’ve already got.” - Scott Belsky

If you're generally struggling or unclear about your priorities: Assess How You're Doing in the specific areas in your life. Do a Time Audit. Set Goals

Getting clear is one of the most important steps in getting more from your time.

Assess How You're Doing

1. Rate each area of your life on a scale of 0 (not at all where you want to be) to 10 (perfect).
  1. **Career**: All things work, including side projects and other aspirations.
  2. **Finances**: All things money, including income, savings, budget, and investments.
  3. **Health:** All things related to your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
  4. **Learning**: All things related to your personal learning and growth.
  5. **Leisure**: All things related to spending your time on things that you enjoy.
  6. **Relationships**: All things with your relationship (or dating life), family, and friends.

2. Write a 2-3 sentences about why you chose that rating. Be candid and specific. If you’re unhappy in your career or if your romantic life sucks, then write that honestly. You’re doing this for you, not anyone else.

3. Finally, write down one to two specific and measurable things you can do for each area of your life in the next month to move closer to a 10 rating.

4. Take action on the ideas you came up with for improving each area.

Your time is zero-sum. Saying yes to [x] means saying no to [y]. Remember this.

Great way to say no

“That sounds really interesting. Appreciate the invite. Can I get back to you soon to let you know if I can make it?”

“Yes, I’m happy to make this the priority. Which of these other projects should I deprioritize to pay attention to this new project?”

The Bicycle

### Eliminate

Eliminating is about getting clear on where you want to go and what you need to do to get there. That way, you’re pedaling in the right direction. It’s also about taking all of the monkeys off your back. It’s a lot harder to bike cross-country with an ape distracting you! Or if the monkeys are too much, imagine a big backpack physically weighing you down.

### Automate

Automating is turning your beach cruiser into an electric bike. While you’ll still need to exert effort to move, the electric bike will take you further with less effort. You’ll also be able to slow down when you want to relax and move faster when you’re ready to cruise.

### Delegate

Delegating is all about upgrading the motor powering your bike. With an upgraded motor, you’ll be able to go much further and faster without having to stop at so many charging stations. You’re expanding the capacity of your entire system.

### Iterate

Iterating is about making adjustments along the way. You may need to adjust the direction you’re heading, or you may switch gears every or grease the wheels to keep your machine in it for the long haul. You may even add a little fun design to your bike just because you like it. But these adjustments are best served once you’ve already on the right path with the right bike.

Enjoying the Journey

You might as well enjoy the journey since that's where you spend all of your time.
If you leverage the IDEA framework well to improve your current setup, you should be at least a few steps closer to knowing where you want to go, having the right tools the get there, having some supercharged features to move faster, and being well-positioned to enjoy the journey.
We’ll talk about each of these systems more in-depth soon. As you go through the material, remember that some of this learning and work in the short term can feel exhausting, but it’s all in preparation for this long bike ride that we call life. If we've done our job well, you'll have a much more enjoyable experience along the ride.

Rethinking Time

Productivity = Achieving the results you want with less time and effort.

Small wins: Progress is motivating

Because we live in a noisy world with endless to-dos, we focus far too many things. We put our finite energy into 10 directions, instead of the 1-2 directions that will drive results.
This means that we make too little progress on everything, and we constantly feel like we’re failing. By not focusing on what truly matters, we don't prioritize the areas that count. That’s a big problem. Because progress – seeing our inputs lead to desirable outputs – is the most powerful motivator we have at our disposal.
Drawing on the bicycle again, you’re much less likely to complete the ride if you don’t feel like your efforts are leading anywhere. You’re also less likely to enjoy the ride.
But if you feel like you’re moving in the right direction AND enjoy the ride every day, no one will need to convince you to get on the bike every morning. That’s why choosing a good direction and creating small wins is the best antidote to relying on willpower or motivation, both of which are fleeting and in limited supply.
It’s also why we are focusing on how you get to your hypothetical destination, by reducing the load (eliminate), getting a motor (automate), and improving the motor (delegate). The combination of a clear direction (not multiple) and simplifying your journey are the keys to making it to an ambitious place

Eliminate

In order to focus on your priorities, you need to have protected time, which is time that is intentionally allocated to reaching your goals. Perhaps in the past, it was easier to get protected time. But in the remote era, where so many activities blend together, you need to take control over your schedule.

Defining the Critical Path
In order to automate, you need to isolate the critical path in your work. This is the equivalent to the wiring of the electric motor of your e-bike. That wiring allows the bike to run, and the same will be true for the automations you set up in your work. You will pass along the initial set of instructions to a machine, and then the work will be done for you.
In businesses, this critical path is often called the “Standard Operating Procedure” (SOP). It documents exactly what, when, and how things should be done. You’re essentially documenting step-by-step instructions on how to do something, except in this case, you’re giving those instructions to a computer. In other cases, it’ll be a human — but we’ll cover that in the delegate chapter.
For any task that you’re considering automating, make an effort to write down the critical path. If you think you can’t isolate a path, give it a shot. Most likely, it’s because you haven’t actually designed a clear, well-thought-out process yet and it's "all in your head." Just imagine someone following you around all day as you work and the notes they would take, if they were to do your job the next day.
As an example, imagine that you're scheduling a podcast interview between two people. If you were to write down what happens in a typical exchange, it might look like this:Person A asks Person B if they’re interested in doing a podcast episode together.
Person B says sure. They ask Person A when they want to record.
Person A asks what timezone Person B is on.
Person B lets Person A know they’re on PST.
Person A checks their calendar and proposes a few times.
Person B checks their calendar and confirms a time or suggests alternatives.
Person A sends over an invite.
Person B confirms attendance of the invite.
This process can literally span days, if not weeks, adding unnecessary distractions to multiple parties. It’s even worse if one party needs to reschedule!
This is a great example of where you might think scheduling differs each time and requires this long back and forth, but it really is a similar process each time, even if the details differ. If you boil things down, there are a few pieces of information you need to know:
What timezone people are in (to make sure you’re mindful of their working hours)
What time blocks they have available
How much time the particular event is going to take
Once you identify this critical information required, you can now see how software can automate this and make it much simpler.
I’m sure most of you are thinking... isn’t this what the scheduling tool Calendly does? Yes, exactly! In some cases, there will be a tool that does exactly what you need, while other cases it means that you may have to patch things together yourself.
In this particular case, Calendly tackles steps 3-8 of the scheduling process above, in addition to sending reminder emails and facilitating rescheduling and cancellations. We have a detailed overview of how to use Calendly in the tutorials section.
"Not Everything Can Be Automated”
The good news is that once you’ve identified an SOP or critical path, even if it’s too complicated to pass along to a computer, you typically benefit from it either:
Having a virtual or executive assistant who can take it on (see this delegate tutorial).
Getting clarity about how your process runs, so that you can improve it.
Having the documentation required to train another team member.
Similar to writing being a mechanism for distilling how well you understand a concept, documenting an SOP is a wonderful way of clarifying everything needed to get a task done. As Richard Feynman said:
“If you can’t teach someone else, you don’t understand it well yourself.”
For example, if you run a customer service team, you may think, “We can’t offload all of our work to a chat bot.” Perhaps that’s true. But in going through the process of figuring out what you and your team do on a daily basis, you may realize that even if you can’t have a chatbot handle everything, the chat bot may be able to handle some things.
And even if the chat bot can’t handle much, you’ve at least gotten clear about how your team handles certain issues. When should they process a refund or not? How long does each client interaction take? What are the key pieces of information needed to resolve a ticket?
Automation is Not Binary
This leads us to the next important concept behind automation: it is not binary. It’s not that something is automated or it isn’t. In fact, the optimal solution is often some hybrid between automation and a more creative human.
Remember that some automation is typically better than none. Just like you still need to peddle on an electric bike to make it move, automation doesn’t need to do all of the work.
Using the example above of a customer service team, perhaps you can start all customers with a chat bot first and then have some portion of those people speak with a representative.
Similarly, if you want to automate parts of your podcast production process, perhaps you can’t automate the entire thing, but you can almost certainly automate parts of it. For example, within a podcast production process, you could potentially automate any one of these steps:
Cold outreach
Guest tracking
Scheduling
Editing (tools like Descript are totally game changing)
Performance dashboard

The key to automation is understanding that if you do the hard work of distilling the process ( the critical path), you will very likely be rewarded in some way.

Asynchronous is Automation
Another important reframe as we tackle automation is that anything performed asynchronously is a form of automation. Similar to the Calendly scheduling example not fitting our most intuitive idea of automation (robot doing a series of tasks in a circle), asynchronous action always has an element of automation.
You're effectively allowing your current self to be available for a task in the future, without the need to be there. This is a similar mechanism to hiring a virtual assistant, but the differentiator with all aspects of automation is that it’s fully baked into the code.
For example...
Recording a Loom video that you send more than once is automation (that’s why from an efficiency perspective... Loom > Zoom > Room).
Using a Calendly for scheduling to replace the back and forth between two or more people is automation.
Writing a handbook that documents procedures is automation.
Setting up a public roadmap that people can vote on instead of writing into CX is automation.
Even setting up rules in your life, like that you will never keep ice cream or alcohol in the house, is a form of automation. Decision reduction is automation.
A water bottle that reminds you to drink water is automation.
Scheduling emails for tomorrow is automation.
Productizing yourself is a form of automation.
Taping your favorite recipes above your stove is a form of automation.
Understanding that automation doesn’t always look like a a bunch of developers coding something is a huge unlock for spotting areas of your life that you can automate.
The Pillars of Automation
When used correctly, automation is a multiplier that creates leverage. You can get much further, with less time and effort.
It’s the ultimate difference between the people who have mastered the machine, versus those who have let the machine master them. Said differently, those who tell the robots what to do, versus those who do what the robots tell them to do.
Using the bike analogy again, it’s that electric motor that allows your inputs to be compounded. You still need to steer the bike, but everything all of a sudden gets a LOT easier. Anyone that’s automated part of their job can attest to this. It's liberating.
Summary of key pillars
So before we jump into the exercises and tutorials, let’s summarize the key pillars of automation:
Automation should only come after you’ve considered elimination.
Automation is a form on delegation. You’ll notice repeating themes in the Delegate section.
Automation should be reserved for any task that is repeated. Pay attention to what you do repeatedly to identify good candidates.
In order to automate, you need to clearly identify and document the critical path. Even if you can’t automate the task, there are other benefits to getting clear on your process.
Automation does not need to be binary. It's not fully automated or not automated. In fact, most automation nicely augments non-automation.
Asynchronous work is a form of automation.

Delegate

Iterate

Starred

Dunk (exclude from study)

Doing Time Right

Review Questions

Todos

Sensemaker