#141 | Buy back your time

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

“If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.”

―William James

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How often are you working on the wrong thing? Fixing the wrong problem, stuck in a loop? 

There’s an old story of a bank chief executive admired for his charisma and ambition. However, he had a weakness: 

He’d wet himself whenever he visited his chairman for the weekly one-on-one.

The chairman, surprised, recommended he see the urologist. The following week, returning to the chairman’s office, the chief executive again wet himself. 

“Didn’t you go and visit the urologist?” said the chairman. 

“No, the urologist was busy, so I saw the psychologist instead. And I’m cured — I no longer feel embarrassed!”

The story, being a story, tells a lesson. The chief executive worked diligently on the wrong thing. 

One of my biggest failures is my slightly controlling nature. I don’t often let go and I scarcely delegate. I have never done. We run Yokeru with a small team; we’ve kept it small because I’ve never been skilled enough to get the best out of others. I rarely set a task with a “deliverable” and let the other person to complete the job. This means that I am often the bottleneck for the business. 

It means I’m busy — doing product design, then flicking to a finance meeting on VAT, then on to a sales call, squeezing in a follow-up, applying for an accelerator, formatting data, training a user, designing the deck, updating the website, and so on. It’s a mess.

I shouldn’t be responsible for any of these things, but I’ve maintained control, held on — vice-like. Each of these administrative tasks detracts from making sales, something I’m good at, and from thinking strategically about the direction of Yokeru, something I’m improving at, and hiring, something I need to start doing. Ultimately, my holding on to things, like a child holding his presents at Christmas, has slowed our progress.

Of course, being a reasonable person, I can reason my way out of this behaviour. We couldn’t afford a larger team (we’re bootstrapped); we didn’t have repeatable sales, so how could we have a repeatable process? This is the hustler-start-up-tech-bro-life. No?

No. These are excuses; I’ve not worked on essential things because I’ve tried to do too many things myself. If somebody else were checking the finances, invoicing customers, building the website, and designing the product, I would have time to ask meaningful questions like “Why are sales slow?” or “What should we do next?”

Critical questions. Yet often unanswered for lack of delegation. So, I’m now going through the process of “buying back my time” and coining Dan Martel’s excellent book of the same name (linked below). It’s a process of letting go.

Dan explains that there is an opportunity cost to spending time. And even if we think we’re better at doing a task, somebody else doing 80% of a job is 100% a win for you because that took none of your time. Plus, we’re often wrong when we think we can do a better job. I think I’m a good product designer — but I’ve done it part-time for 3x years, surely somebody (anybody?) else could do it better.

Dan writes:

“A Buyback Loop [as in, buying back our time] occurs as you continually audit your time to determine the low-value tasks that are sucking your energy. Then you transfer those tasks, optimally, to someone who’s better at them and enjoys them. Lastly, you fill your time with higher-value tasks that light you up and make you more money. Then you start the process over again.”

It’s our responsibility to delegate correctly. Well, everything is our responsibility, but especially delegation.

Once we’ve let go, how does work evolve? It becomes about hiring great people and ensuring we have the money to pay them. It allows the team to achieve great things; because everyone knows what they are doing, it’s more fun.

In the end, like the bank chief executive in the story, we can spend our time on the right thing, get out of ineffective loops, and go to the urologist, not the psychologist.

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My week in books 

Buy Back Your Time By Dan Martell. Dan has a bit of a cult following, and I’m becoming a follower. Yokeru is also a member of his SAAS Academy, which helps businesses like ours evolve—recommended for those scaling their new things.

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Live well,

Hector

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