Paul Winkler: Welcome to “The Investor Coaching Show.” I am Paul Winkler talking money and investing and all things financial. Yes, that’s what we do around here.
I’m joined this hour by an old friend. I don’t want to call you old.
Charles Alexander: Golly.
PW: I know. I start off right off the bat, right?
CA: Just come out swinging.
PW: Charles Alexander. His website is yourcharlesalexander.com.
CA: Oh, look at you.
PW: Do I have that right? Yes?
CA: Perfect.
PW: All right, beautiful.
Being Efficient at Effective Things
PW: Okay, so you and I get into conversations which are always fun about business because we talk about investing around here, but we also talk about, okay, how do you get to the point where you’re making money that you can invest, and what do you do to make money? How do you run businesses? And things like that.
Because you work with a lot with entrepreneurs and we have a lot of listeners that are entrepreneurs, obviously, all around the country actually. I know we had a huge listenership in Texas and California and Georgia and all over.
CA: You’re big in Bismarck.
PW: Bismarck? Is that North Dakota?
CA: It’s one of the Dakotas. I don’t remember.
PW: North Dakota.
CA: Sure.
PW: Yeah, yeah, capital. Okay, there you go. And Pierre, South Dakota. See, how do you like that?
CA: There’s two nuggets for you, listeners.
PW: See, look at that. I know my capitals. Don’t test me anymore.
So I have to start with this: You and I have a very similar story about vehicles from what I saw in my email this morning.
CA: Oh, is that right?
PW: Yes, yeah. And it was just funny because I started reading your email this morning — you send this email out to people that are subscribers to your stuff — and it was about a vehicle that you set all up.
CA: I pimped it out, baby, it was gorgeous. To me, it was gorgeous. To anybody else that looked like something a punk kid would have.
PW: Yeah, fuzzy dice.
CA: Oh yeah. I had a lowered red pickup when I was in college, and this is one of the very first vehicles where I went, bought it on my own, took care of everything, nobody went and negotiated with it. And so I immediately did all the things you should do to a vehicle. I loaded it.
PW: No, not everybody would do, but you would do it.
CA: Nobody would do it. I lowered it, put chrome rims on it.
PW: You lowered it?
CA: A racing steering wheel.
PW: That’s hilarious.
CA: Yeah, that’s not even a thing anymore. Put fuzzy dice on there, even had a Titans bobblehead right on the dash.
PW: Yeah, I remember my ’68 Chevy van.
CA: Oh man.
PW: Yeah, a Dodge van. I said Chevy van because I’m thinking of the song. It was a Dodge van.
And yeah, I put in a stereo, it was wonderful. Put this partition between the front and the back and stereo speakers in the partitions, and it was like a little carpeting down in the back. So it was just nice and you could hang out and you could camp back there, whatever you wanted to do. And you just forgot one minor detail.
CA:
Look, the point of the story is that I help people, a lot of business owners try to figure out how to do more by doing less.
My whole purpose in life, I think from this point forward, is just that.
PW: Being efficient. We don’t want to make it sound like lazy because you’re anything but lazy.
CA: Correct.
PW: But it’s being efficient.
CA: Well, it’s being efficient at effective things.
Having Your Priorities Out of Order
CA: But in this particular case, I was very efficient on trying to make the car look good, very inefficient on focusing on the things that matter.
So I was on the way home from college. I was at MTSU, traveling back home. I’m from a town called Hampshire that nobody’s ever heard of minus me and the other eight people that live there. And I was on a country back road and I could see the little gauge going up, it was getting hot and it started knocking, and I was like, “What in the world?”
And also there was sudden smoke coming out of the hood, and it was a bad deal because there were no cell phones; there was no way to contact anybody. And this nice gentleman picked me up, took me right down the road, gave me a quarter because my little punk self didn’t have a quarter, and I called my dad.
And we started going back and forth through the conversation. “What’d you do?” “Well, there’s smoke.”
“When’s the last time you changed oil?” “Change the oil?” “Oh, help my time, son. You ain’t checked oils?”
Nope, I hadn’t checked oil and I had all the bells and whistles on the thing and didn’t take care of the one basic thing: motor oil that makes the car run. So I locked the engine up. My dear old dad had to bail me out of that one and find a junk engine somewhere else that we could replace it with. But it was a lesson that I held near and dear to my heart — I was all focused in on the shiny object syndrome.
PW:
It’s looking great on the outside, but not necessarily everything is going well on the inside?
CA: Right. I had my priorities out of a whack. And that’d be a great investing story.
PW: Well, it is a great story because we do that in so many different areas of life.
Putting Off Harder Tasks
PW: The story I like to tell in regards to that is just how people typically tend to do the stuff that they like in their work.
CA: Sure, yeah, the easy stuff.
PW: The easy stuff, the things that they like doing.
They put off the things that they don’t like doing.
And that came from “The Road Less Traveled,” that book.
CA: Correct.
PW: Remember that book where this guy is talking to this woman that hates her job?
CA: Written by Robert Frost?
PW: Written by Robert Frost? I don’t think so.
CA: He wrote a poem, “The Road Less Traveled,” but either way.
PW: Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
CA: I know what you’re saying.
PW: Yeah, yeah. It was a book and this guy was working with this woman who hated her job, and he said, “You don’t like your job but do you like cupcakes or cake or something like that?” I think it was. And she said, “Oh yeah.”
“What do you like about it?” “I like the frosting.” And he said, “Well, what do you do?” “I eat the frosting first, then I eat the cake.”
And he said, “I know what you hate about your job: You’re doing all this stuff in the morning that you love doing and you’re putting the stuff off and then you never get to it.” So yeah, that’s very common.
CA: Well, there’s another book on that topic, “Eat That Frog,” which is a Mark Twain saying, but Brian Tracy wrote a book. It’s the idea that the worst thing you have to do all day is eat a live frog — which how Twain ever came up with that, I don’t know.
PW: Do that first thing in the morning, then nothing worse than that happens through the rest of day.
CA: That’s it. You knocked it out first thing.
What Are Your Priorities?
CA: So I work with a ton of entrepreneurs, but this bodes well for anybody that has a job, a busy professional, it doesn’t matter who you are. You feel tired, overwhelmed, you’re tired of checking email at 9 p.m., or you’ve missed Johnny and Susie’s soccer game again, or you pushed date night out another week with the spouse.
One of the first things I always tell folks you have to really focus in on is this: What are your priorities, period? And most folks can’t answer that question.
PW: Yeah, that’s really good because I think about the different things that make your life work. Quite often I’ll ask people, I’ll say, “What makes your life work?” And they’ll say, “Well…”
I have to help them, which is interesting. Okay, it could be your relationship with your spouse if you’re married, your kids if you’ve got kids, friends, etc.
CA: Your health and wellbeing.
PW: Your health, your spirituality, your finances. And hobbies are another thing that I’ll throw in there. But I’ll throw out a whole list of things and then I’ll have them rate it.
Because typically they’re going, “Oh gosh, on a scale of one to 10, I have to rate this?” And you find that one thing is a three and the other thing a seven.
And you’re going, “Well, imagine this is the road of life you’re going on. It’s a bumpy road because you’ve got things that you are doing well and things that you just have completely neglected.”
CA: It’s like the old analogy with the empty mason jar. You have to fill it, and your options are stones, pebbles and sand. And I’m sure people — well, I’ll say some folks — know what I’m talking about, but the old wives tale goes, this philosophy professor stood in front of a class with an empty jar.
He said, “Is this jar full?” They said, “No, it’s empty.” He said, “All right.” He put four stones in there.
He said, “Now is it full?” “Oh, of course it’s full.”
So then he said, “Well, hold on,” and he poured pebbles all around and the pebbles filled in around the stones. He said, “Now is it full?” They said, “Oh, well, now it’s full.” He said, “Well, hold on.”
Then he poured in the sand and the sand filled in around the stones and the pebbles. “Now?” “Yes, now it’s full.”
Then he took a separate jar, said, “All right, well, we’re going to go in reverse,” and he poured all the sand in and it just filled to the top. He said, “Is this full?” They said, “Yeah.” They didn’t understand the point.
The point is just what Paul mentioned, that the stones are those core things that make everything go well. And to get morbid, are those the things that on your deathbed you’ll look back at and say, “Oh, I wish I had time for”?
Like I just said, is it another date night or spending more time with kids or hanging out with Paul on the radio, or do I want to spend one more minute checking another email, doing more internet research, doing more doom scrolling? That’s the sand.
So you just have to determine what those stones are and put them in first.
What Are You Doing With Your Time?
PW: Yeah. So when you are dealing with somebody and they feel like they just can’t slow down, where do you start with them?
CA: Gosh. So a couple of different places. When I ask people the same question, I get the same blank stares that you kind of get. I even had a meeting this morning with a client — super sharp, they’re growing.
I asked them, “What are the top things you have to do?” They said, “Well, I don’t quite know.”
There’s some ugly work that I know for a fact will work, but people have to commit to doing it.
The first thing you have to do is basically just kind of track what you’re currently doing.
There’s all types of exercises. A great book that you can get away with reading is “The One Thing” by Gary Keller.
PW: I’ve heard of that.
CA: Well, it’s about finding your top priorities. And that’s a big push right now: What’s your calling? What’s your purpose? What’s your why?
And all of those are great, but so many people are so overwhelmed they can’t do it. So I help people literally track what they’re doing all week long. To use a financial analogy, it’d be like me wanting to set a budget.
“Well, Charles, what are the most important things you spend money on?” I could make it up, maybe it’s rent, insurance, food. “All right, well, we’re going to set aside this money only to spend on that.”
Well, that’s great if you know how you’re spending your money, but most folks don’t, so they have to create a personal budget. Me and the wife, we cheat, we use Mint, and it automatically kind of puts it out there for us and we have to clean it up, fix the rest.
But then we can say, if I tell Sarah we’re only going to spend $500 on groceries this month, well that’s cute, but if we’re spending $1500, that’s not realistic.
So that’s the first thing: You’ve got to track and figure out where your time is currently going.
Finding Out Where Your Time Goes
CA: Once you do that as an adult, you can look back and say, “All right, which one of these are the stones? Which one of these are the key points that if I do well, it makes everything else flow?”
PW: Yeah. It’s funny, you say that and I’m smiling, I’m thinking, “But that takes too much time to go track where my time’s going.”
CA: Oh my gosh, I’ve had so many people argue with me. So that’s why I use the financial analogy. Or better yet, I’m telling you a true story, the day after the Super Bowl, I stepped on the scale and it showed me a number I hadn’t seen in a while, and I don’t like that number. So I decided I have to get ruthless and start figuring out what the problem is.
And it’s all fun and games to say, “I’m going to go to the gym more, cut back.” But you’ve got to figure out how much you’re consuming in terms of food. I use MyFitnessPal, a little app on my phone, and then you realize very quickly what you think you’re eating versus reality aren’t the same.
So when you want to grab a handful of the kids’ Goldfishes when you help pack a lunch, well, there’s 200 calories, or if I want one extra glass of wine as we watch one extra Netflix show that we don’t have time for, then all of that adds up.
So the argument I get from people always is, “I don’t have time to track my time.” That’s kind of the point.
If you don’t do it and you just guess, or you think you know where you’re spending your time, I can promise you, it is just like doing a personal budget.
You don’t know where your money’s going until you track it.
How To Track Your Time
PW: How do you do it? I mean, seriously, do you have a piece of paper sitting in front of you? Do you carry a notepad around with you?
CA: It’s different. It’s different for different people. For me, what I’ve found that works, and it’s ugly, but I use a Google Sheet — not even an Excel spreadsheet, a Google Sheet. The purpose of that is because I can access it very easily from my phone or a laptop.
Now, for other people, if you’re out of the house, if you’re in the field, if you’re a blue collar worker, that legal yellow pad you have in front of you and a pen may work even better. For other people, they use an app like Clockify or Toggle.
PW: So be super specific. What does it look like? Does it break the day into 15 minute segments or half hour segments, and then you put in there what you did during that period of time? What does it look like?
CA: I don’t try to break it down in 15, 20 minute segments. So for right now, when I fill in my time sheet, I’m doing it on this week.
PW: Yeah, yeah, yeah, good example. What’s going on?
CA: I’m filling it out. All right, commute to Goodlettsville, from 10 to 11 to talk to Paul. And then as I travel back from 11 to 11:15, what I was just telling you, drop off something for the kids from 11:15 to 12:15, go to the gym — every single aspect.
And as you change tasks, it’s important to track it because if you don’t, you’ll lie to yourself and say, “Well, I was doing client research for an hour.” Really, about 45 minutes of that was spent on ESPN, TMZ and talking to the person that was in the office next to you.
If you track all that, you’ll be able to see all the leakage. And I’m not telling you to do this for the rest of your life; do it for about a week.
PW: Yeah, that’s a really good example because, how do I do this? I don’t want to sound like I got it all together, but there is this thing people ask me: “How do you do everything that you do?” Because I have a lot of different things that I’ve got going on.
CA: You do all the things, that’s right.
Combining Tasks
PW: I do a lot of things. And I am very conscious of wasted time. I am very conscious of combining things. For example, if I have two things that I can do and one is fairly mindless, another one takes a little bit of concentration, I may combine them simply just because I can do one while I’m doing another thing.
For example, let’s say I’m working out — I can work out and I can listen to a book on tape or something like that. Things like that.
CA: Book on tape, you just showed our age.
PW: Oh, I know. Tape, yeah, tape, digital book, whatever. But yeah, I tend to combine things. Walking my dog and then listening to the Daily Audio Bible or something.
CA: And that’s one of the things that can work but I have to help people get really honed in on the myth of multitasking because it can work. The problem is right now, we’re having a phone interview, but if I decide to start checking my phone because somebody sent me a text, I am not doing two things at the same time — I am screwing up two things at the same time.
PW: Yeah, because both of them actually require concentration.
CA: Correct.
PW: Walking my dog doesn’t.
CA: Right.
PW: So you have to be very specific about that.
CA: That’s right. Doing an unconscious thing while you’re doing a conscious thing, that’s okay.
But people think that we’re all these brilliant multitaskers and the reality is we’re mono-tasking — we’re just switching back and forth very quickly.
PW: So one of the things that you said intrigued me. I got to get Charles to come back in here. Speaking of Charles Alexander, his website is yourcharlesalexander.com. He is a business coach and helps people, entrepreneurs with their businesses.
Saying No to Everything
PW: You said something about — and I think it was Warren Buffett that you were actually quoting — the idea that successful people have a tendency to say no to everything. Now, he was exaggerating, I guess, as he wanted to do.
CA: Sure. His quote is that the difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.
PW: Almost is the key.
CA: So the idea — and what I think even sparked this interview or conversation — is that for everything you say yes to, which is great, you immediately say no to two other things.
PW: Yes. And I think it’s key to understanding you don’t say no to everything. Because for me, one of the things that I found throughout my life is how to respond when opportunities walk through the door. People have asked me, “How did you choose what to do, Paul?”
Well, things would happen. People would ask me to do something and I’d go, “You know what? That makes sense.” And I didn’t say no immediately just because I thought I couldn’t do it or it was scary. I would look at it as God has opened a door and it would be incumbent upon me to walk through a door that he has opened.
How do you decide which things to say yes to and which things to say no to? We ought to probably talk a little bit about that, take a break and talk a little bit about that on the other side, because I think that is key.
You don’t want to say yes to everything because then you end up with a really full schedule.
And people that tend to be people pleasers will tend to do that.
CA: Yes, yeah, yeah. I’ve got 10 stories on that.
PW: Yeah, let’s do that because this is going to keep us. We don’t ever have a problem talking, you and I.
Do More by Doing Less
PW: He is a coach of entrepreneurs and a longtime friend. I see his emails, and he sends things that are fascinating.
I said, “You got to get in here. We got to go and have another conversation.”
You’ve got a book. How’s the book stuff been going?
CA: Man, the book stuff’s been going pretty well. I haven’t pushed it nearly as much as I should.
PW: Go ahead, push it.
CA: All right. Well, it’s “Start Now Quit Later: How to Start and Grow a Business Without Quitting Your Full-time Job.” It’s a book I published, oh man, last July.
PW: Yeah.
CA: It has done well. I’ve talked to several people about it. It’s one of the few things that I’m really passionate about — talking about narrowing down the things you want to focus in on. I’ve seen entirely too many people launch a business after they’ve “burned the boats,” cashed out the 401(k), and headed out the door.
PW: Yeah.
CA: I’ve since launched my own podcast, “Do More by Doing Less.”
As Paul pointed out, it doesn’t mean I want you to be lazy. I just want you to focus in on more of the things that matter.
I’ve got a group coaching program going right now called, “How to Create Your Own Four-day Work Week in 90 Days or Less.” That doesn’t mean it has to be a strict four-day work week, but I’m working with too many entrepreneurs where their four-day work week looks like an eight-day work week.
They’re plugging in 70, 80 hours and missing out. They’ve got money freedom. They don’t have time freedom.
PW: Yeah.
CA: It kind of kills the point of the money freedom.
PW: Right. Exactly. What’s the purpose of money?
CA: Right.
PW: To express the values that you hold dear.
CA: That’s right. So many people you talked about, why do they earn money? They want to get their freedom. Well, their money, unfortunately, the way they went about it, created the opposite.
PW: Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. We talked about that book. There’s a podcast where Charles and I are talking about his book. You can scroll through my website and find that.
People Pleasing Tendencies
PW: Okay. So, we were talking about people that have tendency to say yes to everything because they tend to be a little bit of a people pleaser personality type.
CA: Sure.
PW: Maybe, when they’re young, they got through something that was difficult by just being nice.
CA: True.
PW: Nobody beats up the nice kid. Nobody beats up the kid that makes you laugh all the time. Nobody beats up the kid that can beat you up.
CA: Right.
PW: Some people get through life by fighting. So, what is it about people pleasing and saying yes to everything? You say you have stories about that. What does that look like?
CA: In general, especially if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re in the first five to 10 years, people want you to be on every board, serve on every committee, and help in any way possible. It’s the old, “Can I pick your brain?”
Which I bet Paul probably gets on a weekly basis, if not more so. Somebody wants to have a cup of coffee with him around the corner and have him regurgitate everything that somebody else has to pay him for, usually. Which is a nice thing to do, but …
PW:
If you say yes to every opportunity, you have to realize anytime you say yes to something, you are probably saying no to other things that might be more important.
I have to make sure folks understand I’m saying this the right way. It happens more, I think, to mamapreneurs than it does to guys or dads. They have a heavier heart, and they get a real thing called mom guilt.
CA: Sure.
PW: I’ll lie to my wife and tell her I had an interview today, but using her as an example, she has served on every board, every PTO thing.
CA: Right.
PW: Every time one of the kids asks her to do something that she might not have got to do when she was a kid, she’ll do it. Or, the same as with her family, or even mine, they’ll ask her to take on this, or go do that.
How do you say no? You want to be helpful. You want everybody to have the experience they want, but she has her own bookkeeping business.
CA: Right.
PW: She’s recently taken on new clients. Do we have time for it? She still wants to be the one that does a lot of the mom stuff, or the house chores.
All those things add up. So, what takes the hit?
“Well, now, I can’t go to the gym like I wanted. Now, I can’t go hang out with my friend Kim like I wanted. We were going to go on a date,” or whatever. I’m saying it’s her, but I do the same thing.
CA: Sure.
PW: It’s easy to pick on her because I’m watching. Right? Right, right.
Creating Boundaries
PW: I think that’s an issue of boundaries.
CA: Oh, it is.
PW: And a boundary would be, “Hey, I am absolutely blown away that you’re asking me to do this. I know what will happen is that I’ll actually not be able to do as good of a job as you need and as you deserve. I hate to pass this up, but I really need to turn this down. It’s actually not going to be good for anybody.”
CA: 100% yes. I’ve had people say, “Well, what do I say?” The way you just said it is 100% right. Dude, I get asked regularly to serve on this board, this committee, or whatever.
PW: Yeah.
CA: I’ve had to learn to say, “Hey, right now” — and I’m telling the truth, this is for anybody listening that wants to ask me to be on something — “I’m actually cutting things, right now. I’m not adding anything.”
In fact, “I’m serving on this, or I’m doing that.” I’m cutting that.
And, here’s a quick follow-up that people will try to guilt you into. “Well, okay. But, would you help find the replacement I’m looking for?” You can also tell them, “I would love to, but the last two times I did that, that turned into a full-time thing.”
PW: Right.
CA: Yeah.
PW: I can’t be responsible for what somebody else is going to do. It’s always very frustrating to try to choose somebody, or try to refer somebody to somebody. Then all of a sudden, they disappoint you. Then, you feel bad because … yeah.
CA: Yeah.
PW: It’s just … yeah.
CA: So, here’s what I often tell folks when you’re trying to evaluate whether or not you’re going to take on a new opportunity, role, or whatever: The reason we do it more times than not is guilt. It’s not because we are ambitious or because we love it.
PW: Right.
CA:
It’s because somebody complimented us. Now, we feel like we have to reciprocate, and it’s a uneven match.
Weighing Out Commitments
CA: So, if you’re asked to do something that you don’t feel like you’ve got time for, first of all ask yourself, “Is this a ‘Heck, yes. I want to do it because I’m excited?’” If it’s not, then okay, maybe not.
Then, the other thing is like, “How much does it recur? Is it a one-time thing? Is there any other way to accomplish that task?”
But then, you have to look at, “If I take this on, well, it’s really only about a hour a week.” Okay, well, an hour a week, once you do the math, it’s really two hours a week. Well, then it turns into three because you’re using your brain, your cognition, to think of whatever this task is you’ve been dealt.
So, that’s 12 hours a month. Great. Do you have 12 hours a month? If you do, what will you not do, now, in order to take on this new task?
PW: That’s a hard one. Yeah.
CA: Hey, sometimes it’s totally worth it. If I’m taken away from TV, or doom scrolling, great.
PW: Yeah. No, no. Not a problem.
CA: Yeah.
If it’s to take on something that makes the world a better place and I might not get to use it, that’s fine.
But, if it means I’m taking on 12 hours of drudgery that I hate, that turns into an extra 12 hours of me doing mental gymnastics over how bad I hate it, and I’m losing sleep, then what’s the trade-off?
Well, you’re not going to get to go to Lane’s practice tonight, or you’re not taking Lily to voice lessons. You don’t get to do some house chores that make the rest of that family happy.
Whatever it is, that’s how you have to weigh out each of those decisions.
Start Saying No
CA: I tell people, “Look, start off by saying no.” I use the same thing with the kids.
PW: Yes.
CA: You can go back and say yes later.
If you say yes out of the gate, it’s almost impossible to undo it.
PW: Right. And saying, no, it’s almost like exposure therapy.
CA: Yeah.
PW: The idea of exposure theory, if you don’t know what that is, is where you’re progressively introducing something that you’re afraid of into your life and just seeing if you can get over some of the fears that you have. I use the example of spiders all the time.
Put the spider inside of a fish tank, at first. Then, eventually take away the top off the fish tank. Then the third step, you take the fish tank away, and you put the spider on the table.
CA: You’re giving me anxiety.
PW: I know. I know it is. But we typically think, “The whole world’s going to end if I tell somebody no.”
CA: That’s right.
PW: By just trying it on the little things, you start to find out that, no, people don’t dislike you. They start to respect that you have boundaries around your time.
CA: That’s right. That’s another thing I’ve told people. I have clients that say, “Well, look. You don’t understand my business.” And, they say whatever business, like, “I’m a landscaper.”
PW: Yeah.
CA: “I’m a coach,” or insert whatever here.
PW: Yeah.
CA: “My clients need me 24/7.” So, recently I had this client that has a custom cabinetry business.
It is exploding. Great for her. But, she was responding to texts at 2:00 a.m. from clients.
PW: Oh, my goodness.
CA: This last one was up watching HGTV. Chip and Joanna Gaines were doing something. So, she thought she had to text her right away.
I said, “So, here’s how we’re going to set some boundaries.” It’s easy to do.
PW: Yeah. Talk about that after this break a little bit more.
PART TWO
Paul Winkler: All right, we’re back here on “The Investor Coaching Show.” I’m Paul Winkler, here with my friend Charles Alexander. Yourcharlesalexander.com is his website. He’s an author and a coach to entrepreneurs and people trying to just get their lives a little bit straight.
What Do You Need to Eliminate?
You don’t even have to be an entrepreneur to get your life straight around some of these things. We talk about the stuff that we waste time on and the things that we need to eliminate from our lives.
We can’t seem to get anything done. “I’m overwhelmed. I can’t get anything done. I don’t have enough time.”
We all have the same amount of time. So yeah, what do you eliminate?
Charles Alexander: So that’s one of the first things I do when I try to help somebody figure this out. Paul is bemoaning the fact, “I can’t track what I do all week.” And I say, “Paul, well he would do it.”
The first thing I do is try to help folks get some easy wins. So an easy win for you is trying to figure out this: What can I get out of the way right now that is taking my time that I’m not getting a return investment on?
So for those of you who are, let’s say iPhone users, go to your settings, go to screen time, and then see how long you’re on your phone each day. And a lot of people may not even have that feature turned on. Turn it on. If you’re not checking that regularly, you’re talking about having your mind blown.
The average person says, “I’m on there about maybe an hour or two.” The average, and this is not picking on Millennials, Gen Z or whatever’s below, it’s us. It’s Xers and Boomers that are on these things, four, five hours a day.
PW: It’s much older than that.
CA: Six hours a day.
PW: Sure.
CA: This is the same for Samsung. I think if you go under settings, it’s like digital wellness or something proof return. But the concept is it’ll show you very quickly, “Okay, well you’ve been on your phone this much. And as a matter of fact, here’s the exact apps that you have been using.”
So for anybody that’s an entrepreneur or busy professional who says, “Well, you don’t understand. I need my phone to contact clients or do meetings,” you’ll see, “Okay, well I’ve been on Facebook, TikTok, or insert whatever here for the average of two and a half hours a day.”
That is stealing my time. I am not getting a return on investment for it.
So we get caught into this any benefit model which steals or we use to justify how we lose our time.
Decreasing Screen Time
CA: We’ll pick on social media, let’s just say Facebook. And people will say, “Yeah, but you don’t understand, I’m not really on there that much. I just check on my grandkids or the news of the day.”
I help people math that out, especially with the phone. So if you take your average phone use from five hours down to two — and by the way, two is still too many — that will save you three hours a day. Three hours a day. You do the math over the course of a year is like a couple of months, the time you’re awake.
So then you can start weighing out whether TikTok and Facebook, or whatever you’re using your phone for, is that important. “Well, I like it.” Okay, well is it worth two months of your life? Is it worth a year out of every six staring immediately at your phone?
Then you can weigh out appropriately. “Okay, well maybe I should eliminate it for a little bit.”
So what I tell folks is to go on a one week detox. Turn off all the notifications except for text messages from immediate family members. Turn everything else off just to see what happens. Typically what will happen is you’ll save not just a little bit of time, you’ll save hours that week.
You’ll save mental preparation, and you’ll save your sanity a little bit.
But what also happens is you might miss one small thing and people will take that one small thing and say, “Oh, I have to turn everything else back on because we missed the neighborhood birthday party.” Well, you also saved seven hours of your life.
So you weigh that out. What is your hourly rate? “Well, I make 100 bucks an hour.” All right, well would you pay $700 to know about a birthday party that you didn’t want to go to in the first place? That’s how I started helping folks think about the question of “What am I eliminating here?”
PW: That’s interesting, monetizing it.
Using Your Phone to Avoid Problems
PW: So what I think is interesting is I listen to you say that, and I’ve heard people say, “Well, when you pick up your phone, think about what you’re looking for. Are you looking for connection? Are you looking for somebody to affirm you and tell you you’re good? Or that somebody liked a post that you put on or something like that.”
But I think that there’s more of the reason, as I think about it, why people pick up the phone all the time. They’re avoiding something.
CA: That’s right.
PW: And there may be something that they don’t want to do. So they can put it off and they can go and jump into the phone. There’s one they can avoid things they don’t feel like doing.
Part of the reason that they’re able to easily avoid is because they don’t really have a defined purpose or goal.
And how do you get people to define their purpose and goal? Are there things that you tend to do to help them?
CA: Oh gosh. Well, that goes back to the what is your priority? What are the things that you should be doing that you enjoy doing, you’re good at doing, that other people are appreciative of?
You’ll hear it called all different things. Your calling, your zone of genius, or whatever it is. And that’s why I say it’s so important to track things throughout the course of one week. Then I can go back and get a real clear vision of how much time I spent, let’s say doom scrolling versus, in my case, teaching a workshop that I really got a kick out of.
How much time did you spend on the radio or with a one-on-one client or whatever it is, the thing you think you should be doing? You can get a good basis of comparison at that point.
And then anytime you see that you got lopsided and your percentage of time was spent doing things you didn’t really want to do versus what you wanted to do, you can figure out very quickly. Well, you have a choice. You can keep doing that because as you said, they’re avoiding the harder work and that’s a whole separate issue.
PW: It’s hard work that actually leads to the good stuff.
CA: It is.
PW: You think about when we go through hardships and the pain and the problems of it, that’s when you come out. It’s like working out.
CA: It’s like tearing your muscle. When I say tearing, it’s working out and tearing the muscle to let it regrow. But if you just walk two miles an hour on the treadmill, it’s never going to happen.
The Attention-Deficit Issue
CA: So the reason — going back to why we pick up the phone — is we’re killing the little sense of boredom. And there’s tons of studies that back up the fact that once we start on a project and once we get less than one minute into it, our lizard brain kicks in and says, “There’s probably an email over there. We should probably check, see what Paul said.”
PW: FOMO.
CA: Yeah, 100%.
PW: You’re missing something.
CA: And we indulge in it every time. It takes you from task to task to task.
I think Gloria Mark does research on this every five years at UC, Santa Barbara, though I may have that wrong.
They will track how long it takes us to stay on one task and how long it takes us to get into a point of focus where we’re making a difference. And it’s about 23 minutes. At 23 minutes, you’re locked in.
But they started that study by interrupting people. So Paul would sit down at the computer and they would interrupt him. Well, she did it like in ’09 and ’16, and recently, and they quit interrupting people.
They found out they didn’t have to.
You would self interrupt every 42 seconds and you would jump around, jump around, jump around.
PW: Isn’t that interesting? So it’s our focus affecting our time. And it’s just like I’ve told people about the study on commercials.
If you look at them, they used to change scenes every three seconds. Now it’s every one second. So it feeds that attention-deficit issue.
CA: Yeah. Going back to what you’re saying, I try to help people really figure out what to eliminate, what to detox from so they can start focusing on the things that they really want to do.
Batching Your Tasks
CA: Now there’s still other things in life you have to do that aren’t in the priority bucket. And I tell them to batch those other life items.
PW: I was just going to say that, yes. So you have a few things that you like to do. Batching, describe that.
CA: So batching being like if I get ready to clean the house this weekend, I have three kids at home. Our house looks like a disaster zone on a regular basis. So when you clean the house, you batch like-items together.
You don’t start halfway loading the dishwasher and then quit and then run off to the bathroom and clean the toilet, and then run off to the bonus room and vacuum half of it, and then run down to your bedroom and make up the bed. You don’t skip around like that.
Let’s say you go to one room, you go top to bottom, wipe everything down, vacuum, clean. And then you move to the next room and the next room and the next room. You batch those like-items together.
PW: It’s like organizing a closet. You put all your suit tops on the one shelf and then you put all your shirts on another one.
CA: Dude, I bet your closet is just —
PW: No, it’s not.
CA: Damn.
PW: Don’t even go there.
CA: So even with a financial advisor — the really smart financial advisors that I’ve worked with in the past, the ones that create their own content, that do portfolio reallocation on their own, that meet with clients — they don’t skip around all day. And a lot of people will do that.
They’ll set up their day to where it has “a lot of variety” but they’re going between random projects, from a sales call to a meeting to internet research to an Excel spreadsheet.
You want to batch those items together because going back to the Gloria Mark study, you want to get into a zone of focus.
So Paul, he wants to do all of a lot of his podcast stuff all in a row, record it, and send it on. He wants to meet with clients all in a row, send it on. Because you get into that zone of focus and you’re getting really good at that.
I tell people to do this not just with basic tasks, but for those of you making sales calls — batch those together. And by the time you get to that third or fourth one, you’re closing everybody because you’re locked in.
PW: Well, and you might have a day you just spend doing nothing but preparing for the meetings. And then you have a day that’s nothing but meetings and then you have a day that’s nothing but just downtime to recharge your battery.
CA: Dude, it’s just like being an athlete or even an actor. They have these full days. So if you’re an athlete, you have a practice day, you have a game day, you have a rest day.
PW: That’s a great example.
CA: But in the same way, if you’re an actor, you have a practice day, you have an acting day, and you have a decompression day.
When You’re Stretched Too Thin
CA: I can get to a point — and business owners, you have way more control over this than not — where I have a prospecting day, I have a content creation day and I have a data entry day, usually Friday because I’m burnt out by then. Right? I’ve got this pile of paperwork that I’ve yet to do the next thing with.
The next thing — and the point of this discussion — is figuring out what some of those batched items are that I can offload. Can I outsource them or automate them?
PW: So we ought to talk about how to deal with outsourcing and delegating. I do everything better than anybody else.
CA: I know you do.
PW: You know I do everything better than anybody else.
CA: Listen, listen Paul gets up and goes and edits and plays with the fancy thing over here.
PW: Don’t tell on me. So we started off talking about how Warren Buffett has this thing about how really, really super successful people have a tendency to say no to most things.
CA: Correct.
PW: And we talked about really making sure that you’re saying yes to the right things and not filling your time up with things that just really aren’t that important to you.
CA: Correct.
PW: You get down to it and it’s not important to you, not important to your family and the people that really matter because nobody’s going to go to the deathbed going, “Hey, man, I wish I worked more.”
CA: “I wish I just had one more day in the office.”
PW: Yeah, “just one more day at the office,” right? We talked a little bit about batching things, and we’re trying to put things together that all are alike so that we’re not wasting time jumping from one thing to another.
CA: Right.
PW: Talk about outsourcing and delegating.
CA: This is one of the few things that folks hold off on as long as humanly possible, and I have too. So it’s the idea of stretching it all the way back — we’re stretched thin, we’re tired, we’re doing more and getting less results.
If you’re exhausted with it, you have to figure out where your time’s going and then make decisions.
And as we talked earlier, you work on the things you’re supposed to be working on and then either eliminate or batch.
Automating and Delegating
CA: So at this point, we’re talking about automating and delegating, getting rid of some stuff.
So in addition to all of this, I’ve got my own business creating explainer videos, these little animated videos for financial advisors and insurance agents. And for years I did not practice what I preached, by the way, I never do. I had to hire my own business coach.
I was my worst client, but I was doing everything. I was doing all of the content writing, all of the solicitation, all the sales calls, and then I would write the script, and then I would story-board, and then I would create the video, and then I would implement, and I would follow up. And I got to a point where I was exhausted.
PW: Yeah.
CA: So I thought, I’m going to have to start doing some of this crap I talk about. I started tracking everything I was doing. What could I do that I could now get rid of?
We’ll talk about automation first, because AI is here. It’s not the future. We’re living in Maximum Overdrive, folks. The Matrix.
PW: People are so scared of it.
CA: It’s a lot.
PW: You talk about it, and they demonize it. “It’s going to be horrible.” Are there some negatives? Yes, there always can be.
CA: For sure, but we’ve been using automation for hundreds of years.
PW: Yes.
CA: It’s just gotten way easier for the average person to suddenly grab on to. And I know that there are some downsides to it, but talking about this in general, for me, when I was — and I’m still doing that business — reaching out people directly on LinkedIn, I’d just send them a message.
I’d say, “Hey, I saw this. Would you like this?” There’s some tools that help me automate some of that process.
And you still sound like a human, still have a nice touch, and then you can jump into the conversation, whatever. That saved me hours. And even after that, I found a virtual assistant across the earth who was highly, highly skilled — more skilled than I was.
I said, “Hey, look, I’m getting a bunch of these replies. I don’t have time to follow up with anybody. Can you do them?”
And I gave them these seven scenarios. “If they say this, you do this; they say this, you do this.”
PW: Oh, man.
CA: “And then schedule stuff out for us.” But that’s part of what you have to start looking at.
PW:
Part of it is, people have skills, they have talents, and you’re robbing them of their ability to bless you.
CA: Yes.
PW: By trying to do everything yourself.
CA: That’s what they want to do.
PW: Yeah, that’s what they want to do. And maybe it’s not what you want to do.
Charles, this has been a blast. Visit his website, yourcharlesalexander.com. He’s an author and a coach to entrepreneurs.
We’re going to have to do this again. It was just way too much fun.
Advisory services offered through Paul Winkler, Inc an SEC registered investment advisor. The opinions voiced and information provided in this material are for general informational purposes only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine what investments are appropriate for you, please consult with a financial advisor. PWI does not provide tax or legal advice. Please consult your tax or legal advisor regarding your particular situation.
