Entrepreneurs should fire themselves

The three biggest resources we need to live full, satisfying lives are: Time, Energy and Money.

One of the traps I constantly see entrepreneurs commonly fall into as entrepreneurs is working more as we grow our businesses. Trust me when I tell you that this isn’t the way it’s supposed to work. If you are building your business properly – sales are increasing, your paycheque is increasing, AND you work less.

A note on decentralized decision making.

Clayton’s productivity hacks

I thought I’d give you a summary of the tools and methods that I use to make sure that when I’m at work and engaged, I can achieve the maximum productivity. There are periods during my work year, like June and July of this year, where I’m travelling a lot for work and pleasure, biking, camping, and hanging out with my kids a little more, so the time that I spend actually doing ‘work’ is greatly reduced. So when I do turn up at work, which has been 2-3 days/week for the last 7 weeks, I need to be super focused and super effective.

Here’s 12 of my best productivity hacks that help me get this done.

  1. Work to replace yourself. One of the best pieces of advice I received was from one of my mentors who told me when we started working together: “Clayton, from today forward I am going to be working very hard to get fired. The day that you don’t need me anymore is the day that I’ve done my job properly and completely. It’s the best day.”

 

That really resonated with me. From that moment on I started plotting all the ways that I spent my day and started hiring out all the stuff that I don’t enjoy doing. In the last 5 years we have quadrupled the size of our team so that I don’t have to wear all the hats around here. It’s not as simple as hiring people, they need to be trained, mentored, resourced, and encouraged – but working to replace yourself, constantly, with culturally aligned adults, is my #1 productivity hack. By the way – this isn’t easy. If you want some guidance on how to effectively achieve my #1 productivity hack, consider checking out a membership in my 3to5 Club – a mastermind group for CEOs to figure out how do get this one done.

 

  1. Setting expectations. My team knows that I take a lot of time away from work in the summer. They also know that I leave time in my calendar for impromptu meetings, but where possible I prefer scheduled, agenda’d meetings. More on both of these later.

 

  1. Setting intentions. Every Sunday night, I take 10-20 minutes to review my calendar for the coming week with my wife, so that we know what’s coming up. We talk about any pinch points in her week and figure out if we need babysitters or if I need to move an appointment for anything family related. Then, ever night from Monday – Thursday I spend 3 minutes looking at what’s coming up tomorrow. Then every morning Monday – Friday I do the same thing. This helps me do a number of things:
    1. I get to set intentions for the week and gets me thinking, subconsciously, about how to be the most effective in my upcoming meetings.
    2. If I need to plan for a meeting or something in my week, I’ll create calendar events to block off time for planning – more on this later.
    3. It also removes the stress of having to plan for things last minute – which, for me, adds a tremendous amount of stress to my day. Stuff definitely pops up during the week for everyone, but why treat every meeting as a last-minute engagement.
    4. This also allows me to see holes in my day where I can plan personal items like trips to the bank

 

  1. Use your calendar. Everything in my work week revolves around my calendar. If it’s not in my calendar, it doesn’t happen. My family and I even have a shared calendar so I can see everything that is happening in my kid’s world and where Erika (my wife) needs me to take one of our kids somewhere, Erika will send me an invite from our family calendar to my main calendar, so my team knows that I’m not available during that time. Ensuring that your calendar is up to date and accurate helps you set in intentions and avoid interruptions.

 

  1. Use an automated scheduling assistant. I got so sick of emailing back and forth with people trying to figure out a time to meet, and it was a huge drain on my time. I could have hired a personal assistant to run my calendar but I couldn’t imagine anyone actually enjoying that job so I looked to tech. Now when I need to meet with someone I refer them to my email signature which has a very handy button in it that says ‘book a meeting. It used to link to Calendly but then we switch to Microsoft Bookings because it is included in our Microsoft 365 subscription, and it also works great.

 

I can use this time to setup rules, like only 3 meetings per day, minimum of 12 hour booking lead time, 15-minute spaces between meetings, no meetings over lunch our (I actually have a separate meeting link setup for lunches), and no meeting Fridays.

 

  1. Used blocked time. I block off Friday completely. A lot of the year I use it to get things done, but I’m trying to take off more and more of my Fridays to hang out with my kids, do some writing, whatever. I also block off focus time during my week so I can bear down on actually doing things, I usually do this on Sunday nights for the upcoming week. Blocking time in my calendar serves a couple purposes:
    1. It helps me set my intention to clear things off my todo list during that time
    2. It shows the team that I’m unavailable for meetings or to solve crisis during that time
    3. It makes it so my automated scheduling assistant won’t let anyone book in during my blocked time.

All huge time savers!

 

  1. Agendas for all meetings. Every single meeting, whether impromptu or scheduled, should have an agenda. Meetings without context and a desired outcome are, more often than not, a complete waste of everyone’s time and result in rambling and story telling. No one has time for this – stop doing it.

 

  1. Regular meetings. Every week our various teams gather to discuss what’s going on during their week. Everyone shares their upcoming work for the week, and then their challenges.

 

  1. Unsubscribe or create inbox rules. How many of you have 500, 1,000, 10,000 unread items in your inbox. I’m not sure there’s a bigger source of anxiety for me. I use my inbox as a pseudo to do list for items that I want to quickly action, if it’s something that can wait, I flag it which puts it in my todo list for later (more on this in my next point). Managing an unruly inbox, or simply ignoring things is a huge drain on mental resources, or a huge strain on your relationships – if you say otherwise, you are likely lying to yourself as I’ve not met anyone who can effectively manage this kind of an inbox. When I ask people about why they let so many items accumulate in their inboxes, the most common excuse is ‘most of it doesn’t matter anyways’. Why not setup your inbox to only show you what matters? You can do this by:

 

  1. Unsubscribing mercilessly to any and all email lists. There are 2-3 newsletters which I read on the regular, everything else gets unsubscribed from. I realize this is counter-intuitive for someone who provides a load of information through their email campaigns – but it forces me to focus on producing better newsletters.
  2. Setup folders and rules. For anything that doesn’t really matter but I may want to read later, I setup a folder for that thing – say “CPA Canada News” and setup a rule that filters that item to that folder to clear out my inbox. You can always go to your ‘unread items’ filter to see everything you missed, but this one keeps your inbox nice and clean so, like me, you can use your inbox as a pseudo ‘todo list’.

 

  1. Use a Todo list. I use Microsoft Todos because it’s included in the Microsoft 365 suite and comes with amazing phone, ipad, mac and PC apps. You can create categories, share your todo lists, set dates and times for reminders on when you want to accomplish things, etc… Best of all when you flag an email in outlook, it comes into your Microsoft Todo list. Some lists that I have going are: Books that I want to read, things I want to get done this week, grocery lists, a checklist for getting my trailer ready for camping, etc…

 

  1. Get out of each other’s email. I think email will always have a place in the world, but like paper mail I think it is dying a slow death – in favor of chat programs. Our team at Achen Henderson is not allowed to email each other – we use Microsoft Teams – which is absolutely brilliant – and I know of lots of teams that use Slack or other great tools to keep each other out of each other’s inboxes. Similarly, for customers who we interact with more than once or twice / year, they have a team’s site activated, and we authenticate them in, and when they have questions for us, they post it in their chat.
  2. Turn off notifications, remove apps.

 

The average worker in America only gets a couple minutes of uninterrupted work done in a day. Every time we lose when we constantly switch gears from whatever we are doing to checking our linkedin status, or the focus that is broken by hearing perpetual notifications pinging us is absolutely immense. I know this firsthand from working on accounting files where I don’t have all the information I need to get a file done, then I have to put down the file and come back to it a few days later and it takes me 10-15 minutes just to get back into the file. There are studies that show that the focus that you lose by doing this is more detrimental to our productivity than working while stoned on weed. Turn off all your notifications, everywhere – your computer, phone, watch, ipad all of it, turn it off. You can look at it later. You’re not that important that you must respond in 5 seconds – trust me it can wait. OKOK – The only notifications I see in my day to day are text messages and calls from my wife (trust me those cannot wait!).

 

One of the best things I have ever done for my productivity is to remove all social media and email from my phone. Some of us like to email from our phones, every email that I receive can wait until I am sitting at my ipad or laptop. Unless your business is completely driven by making reels and videos for social media using your phone’s camera – there is literally never a good time to have these platforms installed on your phone – ever. Their business models rely on stealing your focus and attention – which you desperately need. We all know it’s true. Just do it.

 

I’ve even gone so far as to remove news apps from my phone, as I don’t need to be that connected. Instead, I installed press-reader on my ipad and I log into it using my library card giving me free access to all the magazines and newspapers that the Calgary Public Library has access to. It’s brilliant and it forces me to consume 20-30 minutes of news per day on my ipad rather than constantly scrolling it on my phone.

 

If you want to read a well compiled, researched and positioned book on this topic, check out ‘Stolen Focus: Why you can’t pay Attention and How to think Deeply Again’ by Johann Hari. This is one of my best book picks of 2023.

 

So that’s it, hopefully something in this episode has hit a chord with you and you can use any of my 12 productivity hacks.

Show notes:
Book Recommendation: Stolen Focus by Johann Hari