If you retired today, exactly how would you spend your time? Where would you live? What would you do? Where would you go? What would you have? Who would you spend it with? What would your retirement look like?
Greg, a very rich man, was asked the following question and responded: “‘So, of all your businesses [that you started and ran], which did you like the most?’ The answer took less than a second of thought. ‘None of them.’ [Greg] explained that he had spent more than 30 years with people he didn’t like to buy things he didn’t need. Life had become a succession of trophy wives—he was on lucky number three—expensive cars, and other empty bragging rights. Mark was one of the living dead. This is exactly where we don’t want to end up.”
This episode was so important that I took my time to get it right! Pun most definitely intended! So far in this series, we’ve learned the foundations for mastering our emotions and our finances. Today is all about mastering our time.
The truly sad thing about Greg’s story above is that it is the typical story of most Americans today. We are born, grow up, go to school, taught that the way to get ahead is to get a job, buy a home, a car, have a family, save for our retirement so that we will have enough funds to pay for our needs in our old age and maybe do some of the things we’ve always wanted. Unfortunately, the reality is that most of us don’t save enough, live the best and most productive years of our life working hard for others at a job we don’t really like but pays the bills (maybe), only to find that when we reach retirement age we don’t have enough put away so we take on another job just to make ends meet, and still don’t get to do many of the things we put off doing until we retire. Result? A life never truly lived to its fullest. A life of constant struggle, constant stress, and constant regret. We become the Living Dead.
But what if we make a choice right now, this moment, that enough is enough, and that we are going to find a solution that allows us to earn income doing something we actually like, that earns us not only enough to pay our everyday needs and bills but also enough that we are able to regularly take what Tim Ferris of The 4-Hour Workweek calls mini-retirements throughout our life doing most, if not all, of the things we’ve always wanted to do? What if we don’t have to put off until our old age the things on our bucket list? How would that change your life?
What is a mini-retirement? It is when you sample your deferred-life plan reward before working 40 years for it. Here’s an example. Retirement Goal: I want to travel the world when I retire. Mini-retirement: I plan for small, periodic excursions to various locations on my bucket list throughout my working years. I experience the magic and wonder now rather than waiting 40 years to even begin my journey.
There is a “formula” that you can choose to use to help you transform your life so that you don’t have to end up like Greg. You can actually begin to do many of your bucket list items now while you can actually enjoy them. You can choose to work at something that you enjoy and pick the people that you want to work with rather than being told what work you will do and who you will work with. You can earn an income that not only provides your basic everyday needs but also provides you with the ability to ensure your retirement will not be spent greeting folks at the entrance to Walmart just so you can put food on your table. You will be able to LIVE the life that you have always wanted.
That formula is the D.E.A.L. formula.
D = Definition
E = Eliminate
A = Automation
L = Liberation
D = DEFINITION
The LIVING can be separated from the LIVING DEAD based on their goals, which reflect very distinct priorities and life philosophies. In previous episodes and series I have talked about transforming our mindset and identifying our big WHY or WHYs for each and every thing we do and want. Our why is the real backbone and reason for working toward specific goals and dreams. It’s the fuel that keeps us going when times get tough. How we DEFINE our WHY and goals is extremely important because the subtle differences in the wording of our WHY and goals can completely change the necessary actions (steps) required to fulfill what at a glance may appear to be similar goals. Here’s some examples of what I mean:
General Goal 1: To work for yourself.
Revised Goal 1: To have others work for you.
General Goal 2: To retire early or young.
Revised Goal 2: “To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.”
General Goal 3: To have freedom from doing that which you dislike.
Revised Goal 3: “To have freedom from doing that which you dislike, but also the freedom and resolve to pursue your dreams without reverting to work for work’s sake. After years of repetitive work, you will often need to dig hard to find your passions, redefine your dreams, and revive hobbies that you let atrophy to near extinction. The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.”
Each of the general and revised goals above are similar, and yet the wording of the revised goals are specifically defined in a way that subtly yet dramatically shifts the focus and end goal. Here’s the little secret that no one seems to understand: “If you can free your time and location, your money is automatically worth 3–10 times as much.” Which means you will actually need less than you think to bring your dreams to life.
When you sit down to define the goals and objectives you are seeking as well as your WHY for wanting to achieve them, take the necessary time to really consider how you define them. Be extremely specific and focused in exactly what you are wanting to achieve. Your everyday life and future depends on clear and specific definitions so that your path becomes clear. This is the first step to entering the land of the LIVING!
E = ELIMINATE
“Just a few words on time management: Forget all about it. In the strictest sense, you shouldn’t be trying to do more in each day, trying to fill every second with a work fidget of some type. … Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. … Now that you have defined what you want to do with your time, you have to free that time. The trick, of course, is to do so while maintaining or increasing your income. … Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.”
Two Truisms:
- Just because you do something unimportant well does not make it important.
- Just because something requires a lot of time does not make that task important.
There is a principle in economics which is important when it comes to determining what tasks you should eliminate and what tasks you should focus most of your attention on. It is the 80/20 Principle and it goes something like this:
- 80% of the wealth and income is produced and possessed by 20% of the population
- 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs
Here is an exercise on how you can implement this principle in your life and your work.
Sit down and dissect your work/business and personal life through the lenses of two questions:
- Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
- Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?
It sounds so simple and yet it takes courage to be brutally honest with yourself with your answers. The goal is to find where you are being inefficient in order to eliminate your inefficiencies, and to find where you are strong so you can multiply your strengths.
Examples:
- Sales – determine which of your customers produce 80% or more of your income and yet require only 20% or less of your time. This will help you identify those customers who have required most of your time for little or no return. This will help you identify your maximum ROI (return on investment — time) so that you can eliminate the wasteful time and focus on maximizing your results.
- Advertising – identify which advertisements are generating 80% or more of the revenue, find the commonalities, maximize on those commonalities, and eliminate all the rest.
You can do this same exercise for virtually all areas of your life including relationships (who are your high maintenance time suckers), housework, your health, your hobbies, your habits, etc. Find your time wasters and your most important priorities. Once you identify them, maximize the priorities and begin to eliminate, or significantly reduce, your time wasters. “It’s easy to get caught in a flood of minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.” If you truly want to become both effective and efficient, and finally gain control over and mastery of your time, then taking the time to do this exercise is absolutely essential. Don’t procrastinate! Don’t find excuses for why you don’t have time to learn how to take back time in your life. Just do it!
A = AUTOMATION
“Most entrepreneurs don’t start out with automation as a goal. This leaves them open to mass confusion in a world where each business guru contradicts the next.” This applies to everyone, not just entrepreneurs.
Maybe you’re a stay-at-home mom, and you have a number of kids (let’s say 3) you have chosen to homeschool them as you’re not pleased with the quality of education offered at your local public school and you can’t afford the private schools. Your husband works full time. You also work from home to earn much needed income. Your time is precious but it’s difficult to juggle raising 3 kids, working part time from home, keeping the house clean, the family fed, and still have time for quality time with your spouse and kids as well as some much needed “me” time.
Or, maybe you’re a full-time entrepreneur who is just getting started building a business. As you’re building your business you still need to bring in some income so you have a full time job that provides you income and a much needed benefits package. You are determined to be successful in building your business but this leaves very little time for all the other things in your life, like time with friends and family, keeping your house clean and neat, cooking healthy meals, and getting adequate exercise and rest. I could name more examples, but those will suffice for purposes of this section.
In both examples, the full time mom and the entrepreneur both have a time management problem. They have come to realize there isn’t enough day for everything that needs to be accomplished each day. They are chronically exhausted, chronically stressed, and chronically losing ground on reaching their desired goals. Both have strong whys, have identified the necessary steps to reach their goals, and have even identified the highest priorities for achieving their goals. But, there’s one thing they have not done. They have not eliminated, or in these cases delegated, the time wasters that may still be important but take massive time away from the most important priorities.
Enter automation.
The first time I heard the term automation, my first thoughts were a factory assembly line where robotic hands and arms were programmed to assemble parts of some car or appliance or some other such product. It was cold and impersonal. It was more about the negative aspects of automation—the taking away of jobs from humans and handing them over to the robots. Automation did not initially signal something positive. But this is not the type of automation we are going to learn about today.
Automation in the context of this blog post is the act of becoming a Remote-Control CEO. Whether it be the CEO of your family, your job, or your business, the idea is essentially the same. Remember the 80/20 Principle? Becoming the Remote-Control CEO of your life is simply learning how to delegate those duties in your life that take up 80% of your time and yet only produce a 20% ROI, so that you can focus more of your time on those things that produce an 80% ROI.
In the examples above, the full-time mom might want to hire someone to clean the house once a week, cook evening meals 5 days a week (those days she’s most busy with the kids and their schooling), hire a virtual assistant or bookkeeper who can help with the tedious and time consuming parts of her at-home business that don’t produce income but are necessary to maintain good records and organization. The entrepreneur who still works a full time job could do many of the same things and even expand on the delegation a bit by hiring an answering service to screen all in-coming business calls, a virtual assistant who has clear guidelines for how to respond to various inquiries and when to escalate up the chain for you to personally respond to.
Some of the most successful remote-control CEOs began implementing these types of solutions very early in their businesses and the results are that these remote-control CEOs are able to spend TIME with their loved ones doing the things that are most important to them rather than being a slave to the office with their family taking a back seat until they retire and they’ve missed out on all the truly important parts of their lives. Another benefit is that when implemented both effectively and efficiently the financial benefits can be significant.
If you’d like to learn more about how to implement automation in your life and business, send me an email or private message. Every situation is different. Your goals are not my goals. In order to determine what’s right in your case, you must first DEFINE what your end goal is. Once you have done that, it’s just a matter of then determining what type of automation will move you in the most effective and efficient manner toward your desired end goal.
L = LIBERATION
It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.—Thomas H. Huxley
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. —Robert Frost
If there is one positive we can take from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s this. Being confined to an office 5 days a week, 8 to 10 hours each day, with only 2 to 4 weeks vacation and some regular holidays off each year, has forever changed. Companies have discovered that many of their employees can be just as (if not more) productive working from home than being tied to an office, company overhead can be dramatically reduced as a result of more employees working remotely, and company profits can increase as a result of less overhead and more productive and happy employees. It’s a win-win. The employer wins with happier, more loyal, more productive employees, and higher profits. Employees win because their work-life balance is dramatically improved without having to change careers, reduce their income and benefits, or take big risks to achieve a healthy work-life balance.
Here are some examples of folks I follow who have implemented (whether consciously or unconsciously) D.E.A.L. in their lives. They are now living their dream life, at a time in their life when they can actually enjoy it, are making a good income, have a very healthy work-life balance, get to prioritize their family over their work, and get to go on mini-retirements regularly—in some cases mini-retirements are an every day occurrence. I encourage you to check some of them out.
Kara and Nate: https://youtube.com/c/KaraandNate
Endless Adventures: https://youtube.com/c/Theendlessadventure
Tiny House Giant Journey: https://youtube.com/c/TinyHouseGiantJourney
Downshiftology: https://youtube.com/c/Downshiftology
Tom MacDonald: https://youtube.com/c/TomMacDonaldOfficial
The Doers Way: https://youtube.com/c/Graceleverbiz
I could give a thousand examples of folks who have discovered and implemented D.E.A.L. in their life. Ultimately, I believe everyone is searching for true liberation in their life. What that liberation looks like in each life will be different. The path you walk to achieve your own personal liberation will be unique to your end goal. The question is not IF you will achieve liberation, it’s whether or not you are WILLING to do what is necessary to implement D.E.A.L. in your life.
I am a part-time school bus driver in my community. It’s something I enjoy and is a way for me to give back to my community in a meaningful way. I am privileged to be one of the first adult faces the kids on my bus see 5 days a week. I get to see my kids when they are at their best and sometimes when they’re not at their best. One student in particular sticks out in my mind. He has been a “problem” for other drivers and has been suspended from school a few times over some behavioral issues. I don’t have the problems with this student that so many others have. I find him to be funny, charismatic, and someone who displays leadership qualities. I told him one day that I believed he had the makings of a leader. He got a little cocky when I said that (I knew he would). I followed my initial observation with one question: “The question is will you be a good leader?” That caught him a bit by surprise, and his friends who were sitting nearby heard our brief conversation. Only time will tell if he chooses to direct his leadership qualities in a positive direction, but I am hopeful that he will. The seed has been planted. My hope and prayer is that there will be many to water that seed and eventually cultivate whatever grows from that seed into a bountiful harvest.
I’m going to make a similar observation and ask you a similar question. You now have the foundational tools and knowledge necessary to begin on your own path to liberation. Are you willing to awaken from the Living Dead and do what is necessary to transform your life by mastering your time and walking a path into Life? No one can force you to make this choice. It’s yours to make or not make. Know this though, by not making a choice you have made a choice by default to remain the Living Dead.
(Today’s episode is inspired by and quoted from Tim Ferris’ book The 4-Hour Workweek.)
Musings By Rebecca 