2288 - Simple Habits for Leaders to Achieve Meaningful Results Without the Overwhelm with Time Boss' Andrew Hartman

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0:58With us right now, Andrew Hartman. Andrew, all the way from Orange County, California to Orange County, Florida, where I'm at. Andrew, you are the founder CEO of TimeBoss. You're found on the web at timeboss.us. Andrew, it's great to have you. Awesome, Josh. Thanks so much for having me. I've been looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Before we get into a topic that I'm so excited to geek out on, I want to know, when you are absolutely unplugging and not worried about productivity, what do you spend your free time doing, particularly like interesting hobbies or things that you geek out on?

1:41What does Andrew do with all his free time? I could get lost on Wikipedia looking up anything about space, astronomy. of me, I will click the blue links all day long and could spend all my time there. Either that or I have teenage kids, spend a lot of time with my teenage kids. Yeah, yeah. Why Wikipedia? And that's really interesting. I use it as a resource and I wonder, I'll be honest, I'm just thinking of my own behavior. AI for me is sourcing a lot of stuff that you'll find in wikipedia what do you like about the format of wikipedia like and that just kind of fools your personality because it sounds like you're a down the rabbit hole kind of guy yeah so you know a i mean i obviously love the i'll i could i could spend an afternoon with chat gbt as well but there's something about with the serendipity of wikipedia and clicking links and you just don't know where you're going to end up whereas you know with ai you're prompting you're interacting but it's it's not often going to take you down rabbit holes i guess you could probably ask it to take you down rabbit holes.

2:46But I find it's just fun to explore and just see where you end up. It seems like there's maybe a little bit more opportunity for discovery in Wikipedia where AI is pretty much just going to, it's going to give you what it thinks you want to hear and what you want to do. And that's kind of it. Unless you're very actively asking for ideas. Very cool. That's really interesting. I'll have to have a Wikipedia binge session and just see what happens. What have been some of your favorite topics that have been either mind-blowing or memorable? Oh, that's a great question. You know, I often geek out on the scope of the universe.

3:28Just this weekend, my son and I were looking up the size of Beetlejuice. It's one of the stars in the Orion system. And its scale compared to our sun is just unbelievable. I think it was something like 2 million times bigger. I mean, it was unbelievable. Like you can't even fathom the size of this celestial object. So that's those types of things. Just those things that will blow your mind as you get into the details of it. The thing that I was just listening to a podcast about is just the enormity of space and just how much space there is. And then there's these little tiny microscopic, you know, planets and, and, and celestial beings.

4:10And it's mostly just open air. Like, it's just, and it's so, you know, when, when they, I think it was, you know, just, just like when they use examples of like, okay, if we mapped out like a P right here, and that represents Earth, the next planet is going to be like 20 blocks away or something like that. I forget what the analogy is, but it's really remarkable just how spaced out everything is. So very, very cool, Andrew. Great, great topic. Okay. This is equally, I think I began to tell you kind of before we hit record, just how when I at night am looking to wind down, I watch videos on productivity.

4:57even though I don't necessarily want to be super productive, I want to live a very enjoyable life. Like I want to feel like, yeah, I was, you know, during my work time, I was incredible. Like I am proud of what I created today. And I feel like my goal really is to maximize the amount of, you know, kind of like self-directed, like what I want to do. And sometimes that is, you know, working on home projects, working in the yard, working on my garden, you know, just the things that give me enjoyment. And then I absolutely, you know, just, I want to maximize time with the people I love, my wife and my kids, you know, and so that's my idea of productivity.

5:48How would you define productivity in the modern sense that I think a lot of people are looking at it and how you define it? Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. And we can definitely talk about a little bit later on how we live with intention and how we make sure whatever we want, like you described, Josh, you described your ideal day. How do we do the work to make sure that we make our ideal day happen? But the way I would describe productivity is getting what you want. It's really getting the results that you want. And so all of us want something, whether it's success at business, or we want to be a great parent, or we want to be a great spouse, or we want to be actively involved in the community.

6:24And I love what you said, Josh, you want meaningful work, you want to be proud of the work you did. And sometimes what that means is I'm just going to stay on the front and what are my intentions. And then I'm going to have a system, some type of method that's going to allow me to make those intentions happen. That's when we feel so satisfied. It's like mile markers on a marathon. We know that we're making progress. And often people do the exact opposite. They set sail on their day. They take a deep breath. They open up their email inbox or Slack or Teams or whatever. And they just fight fires all day long, work on urgent and important items every single moment of the day, drive home or shut their laptop at the end of the day and say, I know I was doing the right thing all day long, or at least I think it was, but I have no clue what I got done today, or I don't even know how I spent my time.

7:13And so again, you just juxtapose those two positions on the front end saying, this is what I want today to be about and making that happen, or just tolerating whatever comes at you. And I would choose the former all day long. Well, so let's talk about the kind of the, I don't know if it's the systems, the operating system, if you will, of what you encourage leaders to follow. Are there any fundamental frameworks that you like to encourage folks to operate from? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. A couple of big ideas that we talk about in Time Boss. One is this idea that time is cash, not credit. And it really is.

7:54It seems like it's very obvious. Just like there's only so much cash, there's only so much time. But what people often do is they treat time like a credit card where they are just swiping, swiping. Someone asks them to do something, they swipe and say yes. New project comes up, they swipe and say yes. And the person that's paying off that debt is our future self. And what happens is those yeses just compile on top of each other. And we end up today feeling the weight of all the things we've said yes to previously. It's unrealistic. It's way more to do than we have time to do it. And we feel overwhelmed.

8:27And we both get an experience of life we don't want feeling overwhelmed. And we get poorer results because we're literally cognitively overloaded. We are making poor decisions for all the things that are trying to cram through our brain at one time. And so my encouragement to any scaling leader, any leader, is to really think about their time like cash. There's only so much time, just like there's only so much capital. And if you had a million dollars to deploy in capital, you would be very judicious about how you deploy it. You don't have, and you would know, I don't have 1.5 million, I don't have 2 million, I have a million.

8:59And so you are going to deploy it towards the things that are going to give you the highest return on investment. and we have to think about our time that same way. And so my one encouragement I give to leaders is you should decide how much you're gonna work. And that concept is bonkers to people. They're like, well, the work is the work. I just have to work as much work there is. And that might be every waking hour of my day. But my encouragement is the opposite, to say how much of your life do you want to give to this effort? For me, for Time Boss, I've said, I'm gonna give 50 hours to income generating activities.

9:31And that's my budget. And so what that does, which what's really interesting about that, Josh, is when we define a budget, it engages our creativity. Because I am no longer a blunt object that's just going to grind until I fall over at the end of the day or check out at night with alcohol, ice cream, Netflix, whatever I'm going to do to get out of my head. That's no longer who I am. I'm now making very judicious decisions with the 50 hours that I've budgeted towards this work to get me the results that I want, to help me live the day like you described, with intention, where I did meaningful work all day long.

10:02and I got the results that I want. And so those are just a couple of frameworks. Obviously, there's so many more, but those are some big ideas when it comes to time that we coach and train leaders on. Yeah. Andrew, are there technology that supplement or that facilitate this much better? That's a great question. So the typical leader, you know, like this leader, Sean, that I work with, I come in and we're talking about time. And his first question is, Do I have to switch apps? And when people ask that question, what they're saying is, do I have to do a ton of work to adopt this framework? People don't want another login.

10:42They don't want another app. Most people have just calcified into whatever tools that they have. And so my strong encouragement is to stay into whatever tools you have and just learn to think differently about time. Really, all you need to run time well is you need a calendar and you need a to-do list. And those can even be on paper if you really wanted to. But most of the teams we work with are operating in Microsoft environments. So it's simply Microsoft To-Do or Planner. It's tools that they're already using. Very simple, off the shelf, and easy. The apps will not save us. Even ChatGPT, at least not yet, is not there to save us.

11:20It really comes down to how we think about time and how we manage those simple tools that we have that are going to make a difference in our experience and the results that we get. Yeah. So, obviously, I think, you know, a common response that might be, well, listen, last week, you know, a huge scrum, like we had a huge get something out the door. You know, for myself, you know, last week is, you know, it was it was a 70 plus hour week for me. I don't normally work those levels. I don't want to work those levels. Now, that said, the work I was doing was so valuable that, you know, that there's just such like I got out of it emotionally.

12:05But yes, all that said, there's no way I would want to do that every day. So we have ebbs and flows and, you know, in demand, you know, what's demanded of us or, you know, what our goals direct us to do. So I don't want to address kind of the flexibility or, you know, what level of rigidity do we want to have on our available cash, as it were, as a metaphor, on our productivity? Yeah. So I'll tell you a story of a guy named Robert who I started to work with, had the same exact pushback. He's like, there's no way, you know, had a week similar to one you experienced. But the problem was he was having that week every single week.

12:48Oh, God. And so my encouragement to people, so when I say I pay with cash. And probably always great legitimate reasons for doing so in his brain. Oh, absolutely. Incredibly meaningful work. He's what I call a grinder, where he is always doing the most important thing. He's actually getting great results, but he knows in his heart of hearts it's not sustainable. And that's where a lot of leaders are. They are doing great work. They're incredibly ambitious. They're on the outside looking in, everything looks great. but in their heart of hearts, they know I cannot keep this up over the long haul.

13:19Something's going to break. And they're really afraid that if that thing breaks, everything's going to fall apart. And so in this particular instance, I simply said to him, no problem at all. Why don't you said, what is the boundary you actually want to work? And I don't remember the exact number. He might have said 45 hours, 50 hours. I said, great. Let's set that as an intention. That's our anchor. And you may have weeks where you need to do more. And it's still cash, right? We're always paying in cash. So maybe you have to go get more cash. Maybe that's a conversation with your spouse and you say, hey, you know what?

13:50This week we're pushing hard for a project. I'm going to need evenings this week in order to make this happen. Will that work for you? Or is there a better time that I could put in more time for you? What you're doing is you're very intentionally going to get more time, but you are anchored at that time that you know is sustainable for you. So that once that week is past the, the, um, the ideal is you are resolving back to whatever that time is that you intended. Again, we are, what we are after is sustainability. We all can sprint. Anybody can sprint. Anybody can grind. It's lowest common denominator, but can we sustain for the long haul?

14:24That is where we are going to get the results that we actually want. You know, you think about being a parent or being a spouse, that is not a sprint. That is something that we have to be consistently good at week over week, month over month, year over year. And so we need to be one, we need the energy available for it. So we can't be grinding ourselves to pull a pulp at work. But two, we just need sustainable activities. What are those things that I can do every single day, every single week, every single month to maintain those relationships? And that's just part of a portfolio of what we're putting together for the life that we want.

14:55You know, last thing I want to ask you before we talk about, you know, where our friends can go for resources and connection with you. And that is, is that the, the, the, the, the quality of the work. So there's definitely work that I have to do that is not in my zone of genius. Like I'm good at it. I'm, I'm wildly competent at it. However, what I've noticed, Andrew is when I do that work, it exhausts me. I really do feel like checking out at the end of the day. Like I I'm like, oh, I like, it's like I shut off the lights in the office. I'm like, you know, I need to just relax. And so I would be tempted to, you know, grab a drink or just, I don't know, maybe something that would just be ism, right.

15:41I just need to escape and, you know, take a break from, you know, what is perceived to be my life. And then, you know, there are days where, you know, kind of like what I was talking about earlier, I am 100 % in my zone of genius all day long. What I am doing feels like why I was put on the earth from a professional standpoint, what my gift is to the world. Those are two very different bases. And I'd say probably cost different amounts of cash, to use your analogy. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I love what you're saying, Josh. So if we follow the analogy with cash, let's say if, if, if for me, 50 is the one I use 50 hours a week, that, that drives my creativity of how do I get the best results possible in my scenario?

16:30You know, if I were you, I would be loading in those things that fill me up, that give me the most energy. Cause I know I'm going to get five X, 10 X results on that time versus the stuff that just feels like it's grinding me to a pulp. And so I'm going to try to maximize my 50 hours with those items, knowing I will actually get better results faster by maximizing those things that bring me energy. And I'm going to look to push off those items that grind me. Who else can I get involved? You know, that Ben Hardy question, who, not how. Who can help me do this, not how do I make it happen? And again, I think that's the power of having that fixed budget of cash, at least the intention of time that it's a fixed budget of cash, because it helps us prioritize those items, again, that are going to give us the best results, the most energy and outsource, delegate, defer, whatever the items that are going to grind us and really zap that energy from us.

17:21Your website is timeboss.us. And I know you've got resources, obviously you connect and serve great people, but what, from our friend that's listening to our conversation today, where do they go from here? Yeah. So the thing I always recommend, I know you and I, Josh, share the same belief that information should be free. We have a 90-minute masterclass. It's on our website. It's also on YouTube. And that is the best way to get involved. If you resonate with the idea that time is like cash, then I want to show you how to actually make that happen. It involves a very simple weekly habit, a very simple daily habit.

17:57And we walk that through, and a 90-minute masterclass literally holds your hand through the process and gets you up and running with the Time Boss framework. Yeah, where do you get that? So on the website, you'll see the masterclass. it'll pop up. And then otherwise you just go to YouTube, Google Time Boss Masterclass, and it'll be there as well. Oh, I love it. I love it. Thank you for putting it on YouTube. Very cool. Well, we will link to everything in this podcast episode. Again, Andrew Hartman, founder and CEO of Time Boss, the website timeboss.us. Andrew, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

18:31Yeah, thanks so much, Josh. Great to be here. I appreciate it.

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