545: Take Control of Your Time
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Welcome to the How of Business with your host, Henry Lopez. The podcast that helps you start, run, and grow your small business. And now, here is your host. Welcome to this episode of the How of Business. This is Henry Lopez, and my guest today is Andrew Hartman. Andrew, welcome to the show. Hey, Henry. Thanks so much for having me. Glad to be here. Thanks. And this is an episode where we're going to focus on time management and productivity improvements.

for us as small business owners. Andrew Hartman is with me today and he's going to share his time operating system, as he calls it, that he's designed that can help you multiply your time. He helps people trade stress, overwhelm, and anxiety for

for peace, freedom, and clarity, which is a great thing to try to achieve. So that's what we're going to focus on in this episode. To get all of the Howa Business resources, including the show notes page for this episode, and to learn more about my coaching programs, please visit thehowabusiness.com. I also invite you to please consider supporting this podcast on Patreon, and please subscribe wherever you might be listening so you don't miss any new episodes.

Let me tell you just a little bit more about Andrew and then we'll get into it. Andrew Hartman is the founder of Time Boss. Time Boss is a training organization helping leaders and their teams take control of their time to get more done with less stress and anxiety. Andrew founded Time Boss after burning out several times. We'll explore that a little bit. Even losing his sense of smell for a season.

And he has taken all he has learned over the years to build a system to help business leaders avoid the same mistakes and chaos. Andrew lives in the Orange County, California area. So once again, Andrew Hartman, welcome to the show. Awesome. Thanks so much, Henry. Glad to be here.

Certainly. Well, let's start at the obvious there, as I alluded to in the opening. I'm sure you've told the story a million times, but if you would share it with us again, what were some of those things that happened to you that led you to focus on helping others manage their time? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I have to imagine your audience listening will resonate. I have worked in

small businesses and early stage companies my whole career. So a lot of this came from those environments. So very, very high growth, fast paced. Yes. High growth, short runways, big expectations, way more to do than we have time to do it. I'm sure. I imagine if people listening, their palms are getting sweaty as I say things like that. I think we've all been there, which is challenging. Yeah.

So I was there, you know, it was late 20s and I had a great family, great education and ended up in a role where I had so much more to do than I had time to do it. And I was almost instantly overwhelmed. I was, you know, I tried to navigate the best I could. I had a to-do list, a calendar, a Franklin Covey planner. You know, I had all the things that people told me to have. But what I realized is, wow, I have no idea.

mental models or philosophy for how to actually make these things happen without just being feeling so stressed all the time.

So that led to working all the time or sleep, waking up in the middle of the night, trying to remember details, writing them down on post-it notes next to my bed, waking up the next morning, looking at those post-it notes and they were illegible, you know, impossible to read. So it was just a nightmare. And that season went on long enough where I ultimately did lose my sense of smell. Like I mentioned, I could feel it coming. I knew, you know, I'd have hot flashes. I'd have

Stress has really wacky impacts on the body. Some people will get headaches, tension headaches, back issues, irritable bowel syndrome. It's really your body's flashing lights on the dashboard saying something needs to change. This is not sustainable. We cannot operate this way.

And that ultimately led to a pretty big burnout for me. That was so challenging. I did eventually recover my sense of smell. Took a while, took six months, like I said.

But it didn't totally solve the challenges that I had related to time. I moved on in roles. I grew in leadership. You know, the sad part about all this, and I imagine a lot of the people listening to this podcast are in similar spots, you get rewarded for making things happen. And so if you're getting rewarded, it's really hard to change because you're getting...

You're getting results and people are like, yeah, keep going, or you're making rent or whatever you're doing to get your business off the ground. You are afraid to make change because you don't know what else to do. And you don't know how to get the results that you want without anxiety and stress and burnout as the tax of that. So, you know, I kept going.

Started having individuals on my team, you know, in these early stage software environments that were burned out as well. And eventually I said, I just can't live this way. It was impacting my family. It was impacting my kids. And so really I, I took a first principles approach to it and said, okay,

I have to constrain the amount of time that I'm working and I have to constrain the amount of stress that I'm feeling. If those two things become my boundary conditions, I'm going to operate with peace, freedom, and clarity. And I'm only going to work so many hours a week because I got to get my life back. I just began to build a framework that was going to work for me.

And once I built it for myself, I leveraged it with my teams. They started experiencing phenomenal results without stress, anxiety, and burnout. I'd move on to other companies. I'd install that same framework. They'd move on to other companies. They'd ask me to come help them install the framework. And it worked.

It just organically built to this thing where I realized, wow, this is beyond just me. We're tapping into something that's just the way time works. And that's what led us to the Time Boss framework that we train individuals and teams on now. Right. A couple of questions there. When you started to set those boundaries for how many hours you worked in particular, did you get pushback from your superiors? Did it affect your career?

It took some work for sure. I could not make a hard boundary. The key there is really this, that the fascinating thing about making time a boundary is it forces you to very judiciously look at the things that are on your calendar to begin with.

And so often when people struggle with their relationship with time, they are saying yes to so much nonsense that has no business being on their calendar, but because they're not constraining their time, they're willing to tolerate it. So I would allow myself to get interrupted constantly.

Constantly. People were constantly coming for my time. So I wasn't even working my priorities. I was working other people's priorities. And what your bosses want is results. And so as long as you were still delivering results, then that's what allowed you to do it a different way. You're exactly right. So with the teams I was working with or partners or investors, whoever, I just got really clear is let's align on outcomes.

What are the outcomes that matter? And I am going to build a different system that's going to deliver those same exact outcomes, but do so in a way where I can be home for dinner and do so in a way where I'm not experiencing stress, anxiety, fear in my off hours that are taking me away from my family or taking away from my kids.

And so again, it was a first principles approach. It was how can I continue to deliver results without this dominating my life and without stress, fear, and anxiety being the tax on whatever results I'm getting.

And then of course we'll, we'll, we'll talk about it in a moment, but when we move into the realm of our own business, then that's, I think what happens is that's how the only way we know how to do it is just to do more work, more hours, put in more effort, right? That's just a natural thing. But before we get into that, um,

What's your age range, if you don't mind sharing? No problem. I'm in my mid-40s. I'm 44. Okay. All right. So in that next generation below me, do you think, I don't know if this is me being an old man or if there's really something to it, seems like work environments, life in general, seems to be more stressful now than it was when I was starting my career.

As you work with people, am I just, you know, that's just me thinking as an old guy, or do you see a difference in what work environments are like now? Are they more stressful or am I just not remembering the stress?

So I think there's more stress being experienced. I don't know that there are more stressful, but I know that there's more stress being experienced. Why is it being? Yeah. I was gonna say, I have some theories about that one. No problem at all. No problem at all. One is I think our tools have advanced to where we are constantly available all the time. Yeah. So,

you know, formally and, and, you know, it certainly wasn't always this way, but even, even early in my career, I had a computer that lived at the office. I didn't have a laptop. And so at five or 6:00 PM, when I get went home, there was nothing I could do anyways. I, my job ended. It had a start. And I didn't know about it. You know, I remember coming into the office and getting the little pink slips with the, with a note of a message, right?

So I couldn't stress about that at home because I didn't know about it. And you're exactly right. So that technology now, those inputs have been exacerbated and they're hitting us immediately. Right. Yeah. So you think about a letter in a mailbox. Right.

That letter in the mailbox does not exist in my mental context until I open up the mailbox and I see the letter. And now that context exists and I can take action on it. When we have notifications that are constantly on, every time a new email comes in, we are booting up that context, stealing us from whatever moment we're in. So if I'm putting my kids to bed at night and I get an email from my partner or from that big client or that VIP that I really care about,

I'm, that's the context that's living in my brain now. I don't, I have no way to shut that off. And so again, I, I think that the parameters of workers are still there. The expectations of work are still there. So there's,

There's inherent stress, obviously, in work, but I think it's the experience stress has increased because of the impact that technology has on us for certain. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. The remote environment doesn't help either. Post-COVID, I think, has had a dramatic impact on individuals. They don't have ways to separate work and home.

meaningfully. It gets blurred. Yeah, it's very blurred and it's very arbitrary. And so even the concept of time boss, that whole, that language Henry comes from the idea of we have to become the boss of our future self. We have to think of our future self like an employee that we're planning for where we're, we're really looking to see how can we set up that individual to be successful? What most people do instead is they simply show up in their day. They, they kind of punt to their future self to figure it out and,

And they're constantly dealing with trade-offs and their work and their home life is blurred. And there's way more things to do than they have time to do it. So the average experience of the current knowledge worker, you know, someone who's, who's

values between their ears is overwhelmed. Their average experience is overwhelmed if they don't have different mental models to think about all the things that are coming at them. And so if I argue to that, that, well, to get ahead of my career or to build this business, that's what I have to do. That's the way it's done. What do you say to that? So I'm with you. I'm aligned. So the way that I would say is this, if you think about anything you've achieved in your life,

Looking backwards, if we look at arrears, it was a discrete series of steps, one after another, that led you to the outcomes that you've achieved. And so if that's true, looking backwards, then that's obviously true moving forwards, that there's a discrete series of steps between here and whatever outcome that I want.

So what I encourage people to get really clear on is if you are really clear on the outcome, the next prudent thing is to decide your constraints. And we do this all the time, right? We all, if we're prudent...

have some type of budget that's controlling our financial situation. And all a budget is, is constraints that drive decision-making. I am only going to spend $5,000 a month on rent or whatever the number is for whatever the category is. We create constraints because when we do that, we know that we are going to maintain our financial health.

Our time, in my opinion, is just no different. And so if you think about that and you say, like for me, I have decided for myself, I'm building a business. I've previously owned franchises where I did the same thing.

I've decided that I'm going to spend 50 hours a week on income generating activities. That is my boundary. I know if I go far beyond that, it's diminishing returns. I know that I'm stressing myself out. I'm not doing great work. It's impacting my family and my kids, and I'm just not going to tolerate that. So if that's my budget, again, using financial terms, if that is my currency, it's going

It forces me to think creatively about how do I prioritize high leverage tasks that are going to allow me to deliver on the outcomes that I want or I'm responsible for within that constraint, just like a financial budget. So again, in the same way it would be not prudent to simply run up a credit card debt unending in the spirit of advancing your business, I think our time is the exact same.

And by leaning into those constraints, it forces creativity for us to find higher leverage activities that are going to fit within that time budget to get the results that we want. Brilliant. I think that's brilliant. I think that, you know, to continue on that analogy, I always find that businesses that might have relatively unlimited capital often will make bad decisions because they're not constrained, right? It's like, oh, let's try that. Let's try this.

But when I really have to think about how I'm going to spend that very specific marketing budget, let's say, I typically end up making better decisions, more informed decisions on how to do so. That is a brilliant analogy, Henry. I've studied, so I've worked in early stage software startups. I've studied early stage software startups. And that analogy is often used that it, even within large corporations, often they will isolate a team with a fixed budget in order to drive focused results. Because to your point,

uh, endless resources lead to endless trade-offs. There's so many things I could do. There's so many things I could consider. And we as humans are fundamentally terrible at it. And infinity, we do really well with constraints. It, it helps us focus. You know, if you show up on a webpage and there's a million options, it's highly likely you'll choose none of them. If you show up on a webpage and there's three options, it's highly likely you'll choose the middle one. And it's just the science of how our brains work. And so, um,

Time is no different. We just need to create, again, that idea of setting up our future self to be successful, being the time boss of our future self. We have to create a framework for that individual to show up on Monday morning at 8 a.m. and just make great work happen. But it takes a little bit of prep to make that happen. Yeah. So I'm assuming that then in part, that's where the time boss framework comes into play. Would you introduce a

what this is about the time boss framework. Yeah, absolutely. So the time boss framework is all about how, what, how do I align the next seven days to my goals, values, and priorities? So often most, many of us have big goals we're trying to achieve. Maybe we're running some type of business operating system like EOS or scaling up or pinnacle or something like that, or we're just setting quarterly goals for our businesses and,

The way that we achieve our quarterly goals is being effective over the next seven days over and over and over and over again. And that is really the thing that we have agency over and the thing that we can control. And so the time boss framework is all about, again, being the boss of your future self, creating a really high quality plan over the next seven days where you can be as effective as possible, get the results you want, again, without...

stress and anxiety, burnout being the tax on getting those results. So it's, it's really comes down to two habits. It's very simple, incredibly simple in practice. And as with anything, it's, it, it is hard to change our habits, but it's simple to get simple to explain. One is a weekly planning meeting. And in that weekly planning meeting, I typically recommend people do it on a Friday afternoon or a Saturday morning, whenever they have kind of emotional freedom to make a plan happen.

Really what you're doing is you're creating a plan for your future self to be successful. And it involves really six simple steps. And I'm happy to walk through them, Henry. And this is a meeting with myself, right? Correct. Just with you. Yep. But really good point. I'm glad you clarified on that, Henry. You need to treat this meeting like the president of the United States is showing up there to meet with you.

this must be sacred. This should be the most valuable thing you do all week long to set your future self up to be successful. So I never miss. I've built accountability systems into my world to ensure that I never miss this weekly planning meeting because it's so, so valuable to me. So six steps. One is reflection. So strongly encourage people. Again, if you're making this a weekly habit, you're doing this every single week,

reflect on your experience of that previous week. James Clear in Atomic Habits, a book that I love, talks about one degree course corrections. And he says, if you make that slight course correction day over day or week over week, those begin to build on each other. And over time, it has an exponential impact. So beginning a weekly planning meeting with reflection is so powerful because it allows you to make those tiny adjustments, again, to make yourself more and more effective week over week over week at whatever you're trying to achieve.

Uh, the next thing that I recommend to people to do is to get everything out of their head and into the system. If you've ever read books like getting things done or other systems like that, the primary thing they say is that you cannot hold all the details in your head. So you need to get it out of your head and into a system that can be a paper list.

That can be a free to-do manager like Asana or reminders on your iPhone or on your Android phone. There's a lot of ways you can do this, but just get it out of your head into a single system that you can work with. So once it's out of your head, the next step is to really to prioritize. The reality is if you think about your future self at 8 a.m. on Monday, if that's when you begin work or whenever you choose to start work,

You can only do one thing at a time, reasonably. You may feel like you can multitask, but the reality is you are just exhausting your brain. And so my strong encouragement to you, and we'll talk about this a little bit later, how you do this, is to just...

Pick the thing. What is the number one thing on your list that you need to make happen? And then what's the number two thing? And what's the number three thing? But get that list prioritized where you're really considering what are the things that I have to do? What are the things that are going to help me move the needle on the goals that I'm responsible for or that I'm committed to? I'm trying to achieve simply prioritize that list.

The reason why it's so powerful to do that in a weekly planning meeting is that allows you to deal with the trade-offs in this kind of safe, secure environment. What we often do instead is we punt to our future self to figure that out real time over and over and over and over again. And we're just taxing our brain. We're literally adding stress to our day that doesn't need to be there.

So by localizing that prioritization process to this weekly planning meeting, again, you're going to do it again next week. You're not committing to this forever. It's a very dynamic process, but at least for the next seven days, what are the priorities? Once that's prioritized, what I encourage people to do is to take those priorities and break them down into one to four hour tasks.

The reason why I recommend that is this. Our brain loves to take action and see the results. This is why we love our email inboxes. We love seeing the unread count on our email inbox go down. It's probably the greatest video game of all time is our email unread count.

And the reason we love that is because we're taking action and we're seeing a result. The sad part is us spending a ton of time in email, depending on your job, is not often indicative of you actually being successful. It's simply indicative that you can clear out your email inbox. Not to mention that it speaks to what we started the conversation with, that constant, now you're distracting yourself. Absolutely. You're exactly right, Henry. Every email you look, it's like walking in a different room with a whole new set of contacts. So it just distracts you.

So what we want to do is leverage that same science of the brain where the brain loves to take action and see results. The brain loves knowing that you're making progress. Imagine running a marathon with no mile markers, like two hours into that marathon, you'd be like, what are we doing? Like, I don't know if I'm halfway done. I don't know if I'm two thirds of the way done. I don't know if I'm a third of the way done.

The reason why the mile markers are there in a marathon is because they give us context for our pace. They help us understand that we're actually making progress. And so we need to manufacture that same type of thing for our future self. So that's why I recommend, again, these one to four hour tasks. These become progress check marks on larger projects that help us understand that we're making progress. And do I time block those out on my schedule as much as possible for next week? Yes, sir. That's the next step. Yep. That is the next step. So-

especially for small business owners. Again, we bought multiple franchises. We started them from ground zero. If you're it, if you're a solopreneur, if you're the only one doing it, you're literally managing your future self like a project manager. You don't have the luxury that bigger companies have of having dedicated project managers that help break this down for us. We have to do this work. And it's not as hard as it sounds. I want to speak hope to people listening.

Imagine if the number one thing on my list is I need to hire a sales director. That's a big amorphous task. There's a lot of parts to that. If I just put hire a sales director at ADM on Monday on my calendar, there's no way I'm going to make meaningful progress on that. Or I might make some progress, but I'll probably get distracted because it's just- And you're going to put it off because it's this big thing that requires all these steps. Yep. And in your email inbox, notification is going to go off and you'll be like, you know what? I know how to answer email. I'm just going to go do that.

But instead, if you make it manageable, you break it down one to four tasks, you might say, I'm going to spend an hour writing a job description. And then I'm going to spend an hour getting feedback from three trusted advisors on that job description. Then I'm going to spend two hours posting it on LinkedIn indeed, and sharing it with my network asking for personal referrals. You'll see what I'm doing. We're converting it into mile markers on the marathon, manageable chunks that you can take at 8 a.m. on Monday and know that you're making progress.

So again, we're breaking those down to one to four hour. I recommend one to four hour. Anything less than one gets hard to manage, especially as we're about to move this to your calendar. We are typically pretty bad at estimating anything larger than half a day. It's just hard for our brain to do it. So I'd recommend- For me, just to expand upon this, I'd like one hour blocks because if I'm truly concentrating, because at about an hour, I start to lose my attention, right? So I start to-

my ADD kicks in. Yep. That's great. I think we all have to adjust it for where our attention span is as well. Right now, there are some things that I need four hours of an interrupted time. And that's what you're talking about here. I will determine, okay, that job description is going to take me an hour or this other step is going to take me two hours of concentrated time. That's what we're talking about here. That's exactly right. And you think about it, if you think about it in the sequential order we went in, our first step was

getting those things in priority order, those outcomes. So number one for me was hire a sales director. So that means that all the subsequent, those

broken down steps are still my top priority. They're, they're sub tasks of that, that top task, which means those are the first things that need to get to my calendar. So then in the next step, this one has a couple of moving parts to it. The first thing I recommend to people is just decide how much of your life you want to give to this area. And it's up to you. Like you might, this might be a side hustle. You might be a solopreneur side hustle, and you only have 10 hours a week because you're working a full-time job or maybe two, two jobs already. That's okay. So it's 10 hours.

This may be your whole world and you may not have any stakeholders in your life that are asking for time. And you may, you may say, I'm going to give 80 hours or a hundred hours this week to the thing I'm working on. Ultimately, it's your choice. I pass no judgment on the amount of time you choose to work. What I care about is that you can deliver on the outcomes that you feel committed to responsible for the contribution you want to make and

and that you can do so without stress, fear, and anxiety being the tax on those results. And so if you can do that in 80 hours, go for it. For me, 50 is my max. If I go beyond 50, I'm not healthy. I'm not in a good spot. That is my highest sustainable pace.

This is Henry Lopez briefly pausing this episode to invite you to schedule a free coaching consultation with me. I welcome the opportunity to chat with you about your business plans and offer the guidance and accountability that we all need to achieve success. As an experienced small business owner myself, I understand the challenges you're experiencing and often it's about helping you ask the right questions to help you make progress towards achieving your goals.

Whether it's getting started with your first business or growing and maybe exiting your existing small business, I can help you get there. To find out more about my business coaching services and to schedule your free coaching consultation, please visit thehowabusiness.com. Take that next step today towards finally realizing your business ownership dreams. I look forward to speaking with you soon. One of the ways that I've done this, curious to see your thoughts, is to...

block out those personal commitments. You know, I have a dinner date here. I'm taking my kid here, you know, my, my gym time. So blocking that out can kind of, okay, what do I have left? Is that, is that a good approach as well? Yes. Yes, sir. Absolutely. You're reading my mind, Henry. You, you, you read the framework before I showed up. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. So once you decide that the time you're going to work, the next step is to get your personal commitments on there. Okay.

Because so, you know, for me, if I'm going to work eight to six, those are the times I'm trying to dedicate. If I look at that, then and I need to be with my kids for lunch or I need to go to a doctor's appointment or whatever those things are. They detract. If you think about your time like currency, they you are spending some of that currency on those items. And so you want to represent that. So you can probably see where we're going. And you already alluded to it, Henry.

Our calendar is going to become our to-do list. Our calendar is going to be the way that we represent the work to be done in front of us. So if you need to be at the doctor from 4 to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, you cannot schedule anything else from 4 to 5 on Tuesday, including drive time on the front and on the back end, because we're just starting to be honest with ourselves about where our time is going.

Um, so what's that once that's in place, the next thing, before we put items on our calendar, the next thing that, that is, uh, um, one of the key takeaways I want people to do this week, if they can is put a thing on their, their calendar, I call whirlwind or you might call buffer. And all this is before you start calendar blocking and you are simply representing on your calendar, the fact that you cannot perfectly predict and control what's going to happen in your calendar.

And so what I recommend is if people have more control of their time, if you're a solopreneur and maybe you're a contractor or a computer programmer where you have a lot of control over your time, you don't have to be on a lot of meetings, you may not need as much whirlwind. If you're a person in customer support or sales where you need to be very responsive and you won't know what's coming in tomorrow as you step into work, you need a bit more whirlwind. But the idea here is

Whirlwind represents the fact that there's going to be email, phone calls, client drop-ins, last second meetings, tasks that I underestimate, all the chaos that we can't control. We're simply representing that on our calendar before we start time blocking because we can't perfectly control those things. When I was younger, I wanted to control them. I literally was trying to eliminate, and it's impossible. And one of my mantras in my late 20s as I was working through this was the chaos is here to stay.

And I just wanted to come to terms with the fact that I cannot control everything. So my calendar needs to represent that fact. The thing that I have found is when we plan, when we block out, we then, if we will help our team understand that unless the place is really on fire, that's when I want you to come to me. That's when we're going to schedule time.

As opposed to what we, I think, have the very much tendency to enable, which has come to me all the time, right? Yeah. So we'll set these boundaries with our team as well as to they'll know, or I'll tell them, you know,

Tuesday morning, I've gone working on something. It needs to wait until our meeting on Wednesday, unless again, it really is a true fire, right? That's part of it as well. Is that what you've observed? Yes, exactly. Correct. And that's so wise on your part. One of the things we talk about in Time Boss is that you often have to retrain relationships. Correct. And what you said is perfect. So really everyone's very rational, right? They're

What they're looking for is confidence that you can help meet their need and empathy that you care about the needs that they have. And we're always following our paths of least resistance. So yeah,

you know, for me, before I started implementing this stuff, people would just ping me on Slack or Teams or text messages because I was just the way to solve the problem. They weren't- You were enabling them, right? Yeah. They weren't trying to- No, disrupt you. They just- No, not at all. I just hadn't showed them another way. And so sometimes it's as simple as saying,

you know, with empathy and confidence, you say, man, I re I really want to make sure I'm being a great teammate or I'm supporting you really well. You can say this to clients as well. I know your needs are so important. I want to make sure I'm really supporting you. Well, if it's on fire, would you please call me on the phone? I will, if I see you call and I'll answer that call. If not, would you mind emailing me or waiting until our next meeting? And I'll make sure we take care of it then. And we'll get you in great shape. And that alone, just that, that simple sentence, if, if

If that resonated with people, I would just rewind it and say that word for word. I have used that with so many stakeholders in my life, and they're very reasonable because what I told them was, no matter what your need's going to be met, I'm simply asking you to reserve fires for the phone, and otherwise we'll get it done some other way. Great idea.

Yeah. All right. So the buffer allocating that, or would you call it whirlwind time? Yep. Whirlwind time. Yep. And then once that's there, this is really the easy part. So you think about what you've done. You've prioritized your list. You've broken it down to one to four hour tasks. You have these discrete tasks, clear definition of done, write a job description, get feedback from stakeholders, whatever. You've got your calendar set for next week in terms of when you're going to work. You've added in your buffer. You've added in your personal items. Now you're just filling in the blanks. So-

8 a.m. on Monday, I'm adding write a job description. 9 a.m. on Monday, I'm adding get feedback from stakeholders in my life. And so you're just calendar blocking in, as you said, Henry, you're mapping those tasks into your calendar in those available slots. And honestly, it's kind of easy at this point. You've manufactured tasks that now you can map to your calendar. And again, like I mentioned, your calendar is really becoming your to-do list now.

as you can imagine, Henry, like everyone listening to this phone call, you're going to get through, let's say you decided to work through 6:00 PM on Friday.

you're going to get through 6 p.m. on Friday and you're going to go back and look at that big list you created. I call it the backlog. You're going to look at your backlog and you're going to see tasks on there that hurt you that they didn't make it to your calendar, where you're going to feel pain and tension that those items didn't make it there. And this is one of the key parts of the Time Boss framework. One of our key mantras is reality is our friend. And you just have to speak honestly about that. So again, the reality is

If you've done the work to get items to your calendar, you've mapped it there, you've added whirlwind to make it realistic. Those tasks weren't going to fit there anyways. So you have a couple options now. One is you can certainly work more, right? And that's often our default is we just choose to work more. And that is your choice. I'll just work tomorrow. Saturday, I'll spend, you know, a catch up tomorrow. Correct. And that's your choice. You absolutely can. I think there are other ways to think about that. And here's what I would encourage people to think about. Can you defer it?

Or can you defer items that you put on your calendar? Maybe there's items that you put on your calendar that are not urgent that don't have to happen this week. Can you simply put those items back in your backlog knowing that seven days from now, you're going to do a weekly planning meeting again, and you can map it to your calendar then. So truly you're giving yourself permission not to think about that item for the next seven days. You're leaving it in your backlog. It doesn't have to be touched until next week.

Another is, could you delegate it? So delegation, if you're a solopreneur, obviously you may not have anyone on your team, but is there a virtual assistant that could help you? Could someone on Fiverr help you with anything that is on your list?

or Upwork or anything like that? Do you have a spouse or a friend or a partner or an investor or someone else around that might be able to support you on tasks that you have on your list? So again, you're simply looking to either get items off your calendar that you already added or to support items that are still in your backlog that didn't make it to your calendar. Can you digitize them? I know, I'm sure Henry, you're talking about AI. Everyone's talking about AI.

Are, could you leverage chat GBT for the job description, for example, that's a great thing to take to chat GBT and say, Hey, can you, can you look at companies similar to me that look like X, Y, Z, and give me a job description for a sales director that could be a starting for me. Maybe that cuts the, that task in half and gives you more time, gives you more room to get items onto your calendar. Um,

Sometimes we need to delete things. So you might have a list like that already. The average person has 121 items on their to-do list, which is absolutely overwhelming. And you probably collected some of those items six months ago at a conference you were at, or you listened to a podcast or something, and it's no longer relevant. Can you just delete it? It's just noise. Every time you look at it, you're feeling guilt about it. If you're not going to do it, if it's not going to move your business forward, if it doesn't move the needle, can you just delete it?

And then once you go through all those steps, again, if you just have to do it, if you have a promise or commitment, then now is the time in this weekly planning meeting in this sober moment for you to say, you know what, next week, I'm going to work four additional hours, or I'm going to work eight additional hours. You choose whatever you need to do.

But again, it's not this daily free-for-all that you're throwing yourself into. In a very sober moment, you are deciding as your time boss that this is the amount of time that I'm going to work next week with conviction. It's not happening to you. You're choosing it because you care about the outcomes. That is fundamentally different than just showing up. It's...

5 PM on a Friday night, and you still have six things on your to-do list and deciding to work Saturday, that is going to feel totally different than a week prior you making the decision that you're going to work extra you talking to the stakeholders in your life to make sure you can work it out. Those are fundamentally different experiences. And so the key there again, is just really dealing with the items that don't fit. And that was such a game changer for me in reducing my stress and anxiety.

What I have found also is that, well, I want to come back to a moment here to the habit part of this. But what I find is that as you do this, the more you do it, the better and better and better you get at it. And applying the constraint, which I think is one of the brilliant parts here, key takeaway from what you shared, that allows us to say, no, I'm not going to solve this by adding more hours. Because here's what I always believe.

I could work 24 hours straight for the next seven days and I still won't get to everything on my to-do list, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. So the point is a lot of that is noise to you, to your point as well. Right. If I focus on what's most important, as you said, would lose the needle and work on those things, then I have to first accept I'm not going to get to everything and that's okay. Right.

but am I getting to what's most important? Yeah. Right. Exactly. But I think again, that what happens to us as we come to this place in life as a business owner with being great task managers, I get shit done on my list. Yeah. Right. No matter what it takes, I'm that guy. And, and so we think that that's the only way to operate a business, right? Because, because now I'm accountable to myself, right? Yeah.

And I could hear my dad saying, you know, speaking in my ear, say, well, just work more, work harder. Right.

So all of these things are great. I got to believe that this is, you know, I read one of the things as I was getting ready, or you might have suggested this question about finding your highest sustainable pace while avoiding burnout. Is that what we're talking about here? Yep, absolutely. And that goes into your thoughts about habit that you were mentioning, Henry. So here's the idea. Yeah. So our highest sustainable pace is us...

the most that we can deliver, the highest impact that we can make without stress, anxiety, and burnout being a tax on those results. And really the thing that we don't realize about stress, anxiety, and burnout is that they actually diminish our impact. So we actually do worse work. We make poor decisions. We don't think creatively. We don't think openly. And it builds, obviously. It builds. Builds. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And so there is a pocket for excellent execution that all of us have. And unfortunately, it's different for all of us. So that's why I say...

I have no judgment if you work 80 hours. I can't do it. But if you can do it and you can deliver phenomenal results and you don't feel the burn of stress and anxiety while you do that, you should do it. Please go make massive impact on the world. I have found that some of us as entrepreneurs in particular can do it for a period of time when it's necessary, like in a startup phase.

but that then everybody ends up burning out if they try to do it forever. Most of us, yeah? Yeah, absolutely. And that's where I think agency is so important. We are 100% in control of our life at all times. And so it's important for us to choose it

And say, you know, and with the stakeholders in our life, with our spouses, with our friends, with our investors, that we're all on the same page. Let's get ahead of it. Let's talk honestly about how much of my life is this going to require of me? And are we all comfortable with that? Are we all on the same page? And so I think just doing some of that work ahead of time, I think is so critical. Brilliant. I think they also just interject there. Yeah.

that's gotta be at some point, one of the benefits of owning my own business, right? Is that I do have that control. Otherwise, what the heck am I doing to myself? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. I fully affirm that. So the habit, the value of the habit then is this it's, I, I don't have to be perfect at this, this week. I just need to take the next step. And seven days from now, again, the first step in the weekly planning process is reflection is just evaluating the

um am i delivering on the results that i that i care about that i'm responsible for and am i doing so without stress fear anxiety burnout and if and if you're not delivering on the results certainly you have to course correct if you're if you're being feeling overwhelmed or you're feeling that stress fear and anxiety again you got a course correct you've got to find

the solution from those items. And the value of really locking in this in as a habit then is every single week, you can make those tiny little adjustments. Again, you may, you're not going to be perfect at this week. You may not even be perfect at it a week or a month from now.

But if you're consistently making adjustments, I'm 700 weekly planning meetings into this now. I've done this for so long and I've paid attention and just every week made a tiny little adjustment. I'm not taking massive swings. I'm making minor adjustments each week for me to find my highest sustainable pace and I

As someone that's lived it and representing a community of people that have lived it, I can't tell you what an impact it has, both on your experience of work, again, that feeling of peace, freedom, and clarity, and on the results that you get. We don't realize how much we diminish our results by stress and anxiety, how we limit ourselves and our creative thinking and our impact and the quality of work that we do on anything we're focusing on when we're feeling that stress and anxiety. Yeah.

Agreed, agreed. So you've touched on it, but I want to circle back to this development of this habit. What I see when I work with my clients and teach them a similar model here of planning the week and prioritizing.

They get off to good intentions and then the week happens, right? Right. The chaos happens. You know, the one vehicle broke down. So now I have to change my plans or somebody didn't show or, you know, and I'll talk about this happens in all environments, but likely where you've got some teams or people that could let you down, right? Or a customer issue. And it seems like that then derails the whole week.

What do you say to people that are at that stage to help them stick to this? And what are some incremental things that they can do to hopefully make this the habit that it needs to be? Yeah, great question, Henry. I love that.

One of my favorite quotes is Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. And it's true. It's very real. So first thing I'll say is that's where Whirlwind is so critical. We just can't control. And so if you, most people they'll hear about time blocking, they're like, oh, that sounds so great. And I love the concept of seeing myself make progress and

I love the feeling of control it gives me when I'm planning and then they get into their week and it doesn't go according to plan. And then they just feel overwhelmed by moving things around on their calendar and all the things that they didn't get done. Yeah. And then it leads to this doesn't work. I'm not ready for this. Correct. Yeah. Or I'm a failure. I mean, it only increases the shame or the stress that they're feeling, which is so sad.

So one, I think whirlwind is critical. And again, you shrink and expand whirlwind based off your level of control. So if the situations you described, Henry, are happening often, you should have more whirlwind. Yeah.

Because you're just being, again, reality is your friend. That stuff's going to happen. You don't know what it is, but it's coming one way or another. So just plan accordingly. And again, the value of whirlwind, the magic part about whirlwind, some people are like, I can't imagine blocking off three hours of my day and planning to not work at that time. But the reality is, it's not that you're planning to not work. You're just, you're planning for the things that might come. However,

If they don't come, especially for the people listening to this, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs starting their own business, you care about the results you're trying to achieve. If you don't need whirlwind, just collapse your whirlwind and grab whatever the priority is for 8 a.m. tomorrow morning and start working on it today. And when you do that,

and you start playing from ahead, the fundamental experience of work changes. You no longer are living that narrative of I'm always behind, but you begin to feel that sense of you're playing from ahead and you bring a whole different level of focus to work when you're playing from ahead. So again, I would lean into Whirlwind. That's a big one. The other, again, is just really looking at it like a habit. Imagine if you go to the gym, let's say you've never worked out, and you go to the gym and you do a bunch of bicep curls and

It's like coming home and expecting your spouse or your girlfriend or your friends to be like, oh man, your arms look so much bigger. That's not how it works. Changing our relationship with time is a habit. You have lived into whatever habits you have right now related to time. Sometimes for decades, we've done this.

And so we have to give ourselves some room. Again, leverage whirlwind to deal with reality, leverage that weekly planning meeting to be very reflective and make adjustments. But we've got to build some resiliency that it's going to take time. You're going to have to get past that friction. And eventually...

You're going to get punched in the face and you're, and you're going to navigate past it. And you're going to, you're going to lean into the system and it's going to work for you where you will, it will become your new floor. It will become the new threshold of your expectation for how your week's going to operate. You just got to build that habit. Yeah, that makes sense. Well said. All right. Tell me more about the services that you offer through Time Boss. And also I believe there's a masterclass that you offer. So tell me about all of that, if you would.

Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, time boss partners with individuals and teams to teach this framework. So again, it's a seven day framework that can be adopted into any environment. So we do workshops to, uh, help, uh, individuals or teams learn the time boss framework, uh,

We do group coaching that helps people both learn and adopt it. So it really helps them work through the friction over a six to eight week period. We have a digital course that helps people learn and adopt the TimeBoss framework. So there's a variety of ways that people can participate. And then typically with teams, we support them ongoing in ongoing education, coaching,

Um, ongoing workshops, that type of thing. And yeah, you mentioned the masterclass. Um, I love the masterclass. It is a 90 minute overview of what we just discussed in detail. It will help you run your very first weekly planning meeting. Um, it'll show you how to run your week, how to deal with interruptions and diversions.

We didn't get into the daily review meeting, but there's a daily meeting as well. And it'll walk you through how to do that. 90 minutes. It's free on the TimeBoss website, timeboss.us forward slash masterclass. Or if you go to the TimeBoss website and tap on resources, you'll see a bunch of free resources there. So a huge believer that information should be free. Education should be free. If you need help with implementation or taking the next step, we'd love to chat more. Excellent. Excellent. Well, I'll have a link.

to that site on the show notes page to this episode at thehowitbusiness.com as well. All right. I'm always looking for a book recommendation. You mentioned it already, Atomic Habits. Why do you recommend that book? You know, James Clear took something that we all know about. We know about habits. The science has been out there forever. And he simplified it in a way that makes it a tool that you can use. I just love what he did.

in breaking down habits into these simple processes, including the science behind it that really helps us get up and running with anything. And so even he's even influenced the way I think about TimeBoss and how I teach TimeBoss to really lean into that weekly planning meeting as a habit. That what becomes most important in a new habit is reps and just getting reps, showing up no matter what and building that experiential equity that you're the kind of person that can do that habit.

So it's a great one. If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend it. I promise it will have a positive impact on your business. For anyone that's listening, I think they value it. Thank you. Thanks for that recommendation.

All right, we'll wrap it up here, Andrew. What's one thing you want to stick away from this conversation, especially, again, on this topic that we focus on of controlling your time? And as you say, wrangling the chaos, optimizing time, avoiding burnout. What's one thing you want to stick away? Yeah, I think the one thing I would give everyone listening is reality is your friend. Just speaking honestly about this stuff. If you are in

a mode where you are just shoveling faster and you're just trying to keep going and you're working every hour of the day that you have my strong consideration for you is to take a pause think honestly about where you're at strongly encourage you to consider constraining your time and saying this is the amount of life i'm willing to give to this endeavor add in that whirlwind give yourself some realistic buffer and then try to move forward again i just think

I was that person. I was you. I was working nonstop every hour that I had, and it broke me down over time. And I just would love for you to know that there's another path forward. Yeah. And again, as we touched on, it's what then will allow you the us be able to realize the freedoms of business ownership. And one of those freedoms is time to spend on other thing on other people.

If you're not realizing that, then what the heck are we doing to ourselves? Right. Right. Right. But I love to all of that. I think the thing that I would echo, there was a huge takeaway from me, a lot of things you shared that they were very actionable, but this constraint on our time, I think is a brilliant way to think about it. And again, if we will just make that mindset, mindset shift, Andrew, I think that'll help all of us to, to begin to make progress on managing our time and,

and being our own time boss. I think that's brilliant. Awesome. Tell me again where you want us to go online to learn more. Yeah, timeboss.us. And on there, there's the resources tab, a bunch of free resources for planning quarterly goals, the masterclass and others that I think will be valuable for everyone. Fantastic. Andrew, wonderful conversation. Thanks for sharing all of the actionable information. Really great stuff. I appreciate you taking the time to be with me today. Thanks so much, Henry. Grateful. Thank you.

This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for joining me on this episode of The How of Business. My guest today again is Andrew Hartman. I release new episodes every Monday morning, and you can find the show anywhere you listen to podcasts, including The How of Business YouTube channel and at my website, thehowofbusiness.com. Thanks again for listening. Thank you for listening to The How of Business. For more information about our coaching programs, online courses, show notes pages, links, and other resources, please visit thehowofbusiness.com.