How to free up time and do the work only you can do

Creating more space on your calendar is simple

There are only four words you need to know.

Eliminate, Simplify, Delegate, Automate.

Use them wisely and you’ll have more time on your hands than work.

Take each task or recurring piece of work you do and run them through this filter.

Eliminate

If I don’t do this job what will happen? If nothing happens, meaning no one will care and nothing breaks then it’s worthless work. I.e. delete it.

Simplify

How can I achieve the same outcome by doing less? Less mouse clicks, less conversations, less steps. How can you complete that job as efficiently as possible?

Automate

Is there a machine or piece of software that can do this for you? Jump into Google and search ‘content scheduling’ ‘invoicing’ ‘payroll’ if your job is handling information there’ll be a piece of software that can do it for you.

Delegate

Is your task repetitive, teachable and doable by others? Great, write out your process and delegate it.

This is part of my productivity process I run through quarterly to free up time and spend it doing the stuff that matters.

What’s Going On

Do you use GoDaddy to host your website? You might want to change your password #Security

If you don’t care about shipping times here’s 100+ Black Friday deals about to launch #Blackfriday

Inequality continues to grow the world over, do our governments have any answers? #Economics

How to build company foundations

Marc Lore has founded and built multiple unicorn ($1 billi) companies, like jet.com and Quidsi.

Recently on the masters of scale podcast with Reid Hoffman, he shared the framework he uses to set the foundations of his companies.

He calls it VCP or vision, capital and people. When he gets these right he says everything else will fall into place.

Capital and people are popular conversation and tension points for entrepreneurs, but not vision. Which is what Marc cares about most.

For him, vision comes first. He breaks down his vision into four buckets.

Mission, Values, Strategy, Vision.

Mission + Values sit on one side, and Strategy + Vision on the other.

Mission + Values gives an emotional connection to your company. They tell your people and your customers ‘why you exist’, ‘why they should care’ & ‘what they’re getting up for in the morning’.

Reputation, brand and founding culture are built from these mission statements and values.

Vision + Strategy shows your team how you’ll win and what the future will look like when you get there.

Marc likes to keep strategy simple, usually settling with 3 – 5 core ideas that’ll make the vision possible. He then sets KPIs to measure progress towards the vision and ideates with his team to find the tactics that will make the strategy possible.

Shower Thought

In space you could have double sided Pizza

Why those who think they know best, end up worse-off

/

There are outcomes we can confidently predict. Throw a ball in the air and it’ll return to earth. Drink more water and you’ll need to visit the bathroom more.

These scenarios are explained by science, the language of our natural environment. And you like me will get no kudos for those predictions.

For the rest of life’s wrinkles, especially the ones concerning complex man-made systems we’re on our own. Science won’t help, psychology won’t help and certainly not economics.

We should look at predictions made about the unnatural world or our interactions with the natural world, with a glass half empty.

The best golfers in the world only hit fairways 75% of the time. The best chefs cook shitty meals and you can’t even tell me where you left your keys.

When humans are involved an outcome is never predictable, instead just has a degree of likelihood.

Those who believe and cling wholeheartedly to their predictions are the ones who suffer most when what they suppose is probable turns out to be fallible. Because they confuse their predictions with truth they leave themselves open to the cost of prediction errors.

When you’re overconfident you leave yourself no room for error and any outcome that doesn’t land on the tiny balance beam you’ve left for yourself leads to complete ruin.

We acknowledge this problem when our government tells us to. Speed limits have saved many of us from unnecessary pain. But we struggle elsewhere.

Armed with this knowledge the grain of salt we should take with any prediction, ours and others is “There’s no harm in hoping for the best if you’re prepared for the worst”.

I get that there’s little use in agonising over every little decision, as full of assumptions as they might be.

So perhaps preparing for the worst without becoming a prepper, looks like introducing a margin of safety only when you have the possibility of going to zero.

If you bear debt, how many interest rate rises can you swallow? If you have a payroll to make at what point (revenue) and how long for (runway) can you continue to make payroll, during say another lockdown.

Once you have a general idea of your margin for error, you can adjust your decision making to account for 100-year scenarios (which happen more frequently than advertised).

Feedback Corner