Latest / The Action Catalyst / REMASTERED: Less Stress, More Productivity, with Ari Meisel (Time Management, Email, Tech, Business)

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REMASTERED: Less Stress, More Productivity, with Ari Meisel (Time Management, Email, Tech, Business) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Host: This gentleman you're about to hear from. His name is
• 0:02
  Ari Meisel. He has an amazing story. He was diagnosed with an
• 0:08
  incurable and very painful chronic condition, which we're
• 0:12
  going to talk about, and I'll let him tell you about it, and
• 0:16
  the strategy that he used to save his life and get his life
• 0:20
  back also then turned into a system of productivity that he
• 0:26
  has built a huge online following around now teaching
• 0:29
  people how to do this. The system's called Less Doing and
• 0:32
  More Living. So Ari, thanks for being here. Just tell everyone
• 0:35
  like, what's your story? What was the condition you had to
• 0:38
  kind of tell us what the trajectory your life was on, and
• 0:42
  then what change you made, and what was the result of that?
• 0:45
  Ari Meisel: So, I was working in construction. I was in real
• 0:49
  estate development in upstate New York, and I was, I was
• 0:51
  living a very hard lifestyle. I was working, you know, 1618,
• 0:54
  hours a day in not the safest conditions. I was smoking a pack
• 0:57
  of cigarettes a day. I was eating fast food, drinking
• 1:00
  stress beyond my mind, and basically broke myself. When I
• 1:04
  was 23 I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which, as you
• 1:07
  mentioned, is an incurable illness, and it was a very, very
• 1:10
  rough for a few years, and I was on a lot of meds, and I kept
• 1:14
  getting sicker, and then basically had this big
• 1:16
  turnaround where I went on this long journey of self tracking
• 1:20
  and self experimentation. And about four months after that, I
• 1:24
  got off my meds, and two months later, was in my first
• 1:27
  triathlon. And the way that that sort of all confluenced into
• 1:30
  creating what I do now is that I went from a place where I was
• 1:33
  working 18 hours a day to barely being able to do an hour of work
• 1:36
  a day, and I was also stressed out of my mind. So less doing
• 1:39
  basically, was born out of this need to mitigate stress and get
• 1:42
  more done in one hour than I had been able to get done in a full
• 1:46
  day before.
• 1:47
  Host: And so before we dive into kind of how that applies in the
• 1:50
  professional world, what were some of the things that
• 1:52
  happened? What are some of the things that you did?
• 1:55
  Ari Meisel: Well I did a lot of experimentation, but I ended up
• 1:56
  with a high fat, low sugar diet. So that was a big one exercise,
• 2:00
  not that I recommend Iron Man, but exercise to the extent that
• 2:04
  I was really ramping up my metabolism. So I was able, in my
• 2:08
  opinion, to burn through food a lot better. Which one of the
• 2:11
  issues with Crohn's is that you end up getting obstructions
• 2:13
  because you have all the scarring. So that was helpful.
• 2:15
  And then it really all came back to stress, you know, because you
• 2:19
  can tell somebody, and I've replicated my results in dozens
• 2:23
  of other Crohn's patients at this point, but you can tell
• 2:24
  somebody, Hey, you want to feel better, eat this, take these
• 2:28
  supplements and do these exercises, and it's
• 2:30
  prescriptive, and they can do it or not do it. But if you say to
• 2:33
  somebody, okay, now you need to manage your stress, it's, it's
• 2:37
  way more nebulous. You know, it's a lot harder for people to
• 2:39
  sort of get their hands around that. So I wanted to create a
• 2:42
  really systematic way of doing that. So the overall framework,
• 2:47
  the baseline framework, is that I help people optimize, automate
• 2:51
  and outsource everything in their lives, including their
• 2:53
  health, in order to be more effective. And it's just a very
• 2:56
  important order for me, because most people in the modern world
• 2:59
  have an experience with delegation, even if it's just
• 3:02
  telling your kids to do their chores. But the problem is, is
• 3:04
  that a lot of people get into this mode where they tell
• 3:07
  somebody to do something, and that's it. That's the end of it.
• 3:10
  And that's not true delegation. And really what you're just
• 3:13
  doing is basically sweeping the dirt under the rug. It doesn't
• 3:16
  make the problem any better. You're just shifting it to
• 3:19
  someone else, and in most cases, that will come back to you
• 3:22
  right. The pipes got to back up. So you have to optimize first.
• 3:25
  And with optimization, what I'm really talking about with most
• 3:27
  people is tracking because there's so much going on in our
• 3:29
  lives, so many inputs, so much stuff, and a lot of the
• 3:32
  overwhelm that people experience is because they just don't know
• 3:35
  what's causing the overwhelm. So if you start to track things,
• 3:38
  and whether it's how many emails you sent yesterday, how many
• 3:40
  steps you took today, how much sleep you got, what you ate, how
• 3:44
  many phone calls you made, and how long they lasted, like all
• 3:46
  of this stuff that we do now can be tracked pretty much
• 3:48
  automatically, and even if you don't do anything with that
• 3:51
  information, just tracking it, it has been proven to be really
• 3:55
  powerful in terms of giving us back a little element of
• 3:57
  control. Hopefully, what you do with that information is start
• 3:59
  to identify how you were actually spending your time,
• 4:02
  your money, your energy, your resources, and then look at the
• 4:05
  processes that you're going through to see areas that you
• 4:07
  can make more efficient. The second part of automation is
• 4:10
  really my playground now, because so many things can be
• 4:12
  automated today, we we can automate things now for free, in
• 4:16
  many cases that three months ago, a person had to do. It's
• 4:19
  just fascinating what technology has done for us. So you optimize
• 4:22
  for us, then you automate what automate what you can and then
• 4:24
  if there's anything left over, that's the first time you look
• 4:26
  at outsourcing it to a specialist or generalist of some
• 4:29
  kind.
• 4:30
  Host: In terms of measuring like, what are, what are some of
• 4:32
  the common things that you see or you find that you go these.
• 4:37
  These are the things that people are doing that are causing them
• 4:40
  overwhelm that they don't realize are causing them
• 4:43
  overwhelm?
• 4:44
  Ari Meisel: So there's two sides to that equation. Right on the
• 4:46
  one side, you have the day to day stuff that just annoys
• 4:49
  people, you know, like making lunch, making school lunch every
• 4:52
  day. That's something that's just, you know, it's difficult,
• 4:55
  especially for people who are nine to five jobs. It's
• 4:57
  stressful. It really is. And I have three young boys, and I. Do
• 5:00
  it. We do it every day, but it's also something that definitely
• 5:02
  can be made more efficient, and there are ways to do that.
• 5:05
  Paying bills, those are the kinds of things that almost
• 5:08
  everybody has experience with. How you commute to work is
• 5:11
  something that can be made more efficient, whether it's not
• 5:14
  necessarily the route, but there's a lot of things you can
• 5:17
  do while you are in transit that people don't necessarily think
• 5:20
  that they can get done especially like, for example,
• 5:23
  you could have a virtual assistant do all your email with
• 5:26
  you on the phone while you're driving, which is totally fine.
• 5:30
  You could dictate an entire book if you wanted to while you were
• 5:33
  driving. You know, there's all sorts of things that you can get
• 5:35
  done in a commute. I mean, and a lot of people, that's a really
• 5:38
  effective strategy. But then there's the other side of it.
• 5:40
  There's the really big projects that people wrongly assume have
• 5:44
  to be done by them so they'll never get done. And they assume
• 5:48
  that because, like, who could possibly do this? But what they
• 5:51
  don't realize is that there are tons of services or tons of ways
• 5:54
  to get that done. My father is a great example. I was having
• 5:56
  dinner with him last night, and he was saying that he's got this
• 5:58
  collection of photographs that he'd really like to sell. He's
• 6:01
  like, but I have to photograph him. And then I was like, Dad,
• 6:04
  we can have literally two people come and do that whole thing for
• 6:07
  you, from the photographing it to the cataloging, to the
• 6:09
  putting it on eBay to the shipping. I was like, you can
• 6:12
  just say, do it, and I can get this done with no effort on
• 6:15
  either of our parts. And it's so it's that kind of thing too,
• 6:18
  where people just, they just don't and it's not their fault.
• 6:21
  They're just not aware of the fact that there are these
• 6:23
  services and there's people that are available to do this stuff
• 6:26
  for you.
• 6:27
  Host: So I want to talk to you about the world of virtual
• 6:29
  assistants. Tell us, like, what do we need to know about them?
• 6:32
  Where are they? How do you use them? What do you use them for?
• 6:35
  Ari Meisel: Okay, so it's great question. I'll tell you what the
• 6:38
  industry looked like and what there is now. So the landscape,
• 6:41
  as it was, was there were two kinds of virtual assistants, and
• 6:44
  I've been a huge, huge fan of virtual assistant services for a
• 6:47
  long time. I've tested 23 of them over the last five years,
• 6:50
  and learned a lot, obviously, from doing that. I actually
• 6:53
  think that everybody should work with a virtual assistant at some
• 6:57
  point, especially if you're in a nine to five job or a corporate
• 7:00
  environment, because it's a learning experience for you in
• 7:03
  terms of how you effectively communicate and delegate the
• 7:06
  things that you want done. So there are two kinds of virtual
• 7:09
  assistants. There's the on demand assistant, which is the,
• 7:12
  well, actually, I'll start with the other one. There's a
• 7:15
  dedicated assistant, which is fairly straightforward. It's
• 7:17
  where you're dealing with one person, and they get to know you
• 7:21
  and and, by the way, just to define virtual assistant, it's
• 7:24
  really just an assistant who isn't in the room with you.
• 7:26
  That's basically what it means. It could be across the across
• 7:30
  town, or across the globe. And historically, five years ago,
• 7:33
  I'd say, if you really, if you wanted a virtual assistant, you
• 7:36
  went to India. That was just the way it was. There was companies
• 7:39
  like ask Sunday you had Friday tasks, today tasks every day.
• 7:42
  There was a bunch of them. And that was the place. But now it's
• 7:45
  the last place that I would want to get a virtual assistant from,
• 7:49
  because the labor market for virtual assistants there just
• 7:52
  got completely flooded, and the quality went down quite a bit,
• 7:55
  which, by the way, is an interesting observation on
• 7:57
  outsourcing in general. Because if you want to go to India for
• 8:00
  outsourcing now, SEO is great where, and this stuff shifts
• 8:03
  around, like if you want to get graphic design done now, Eastern
• 8:07
  Europe is fantastic. Poland is great for programmers right now,
• 8:10
  and Costa Rica is fantastic for call centers. But that wasn't
• 8:13
  the case two years ago. And I don't know why that is, but I
• 8:16
  just see these things if you if you do want to go out of country
• 8:19
  for virtual assistant now, most people would go to the
• 8:22
  Philippines. The only problem with that the Filipino language,
• 8:25
  Tagalog is extremely facial expression based. So when you're
• 8:28
  communicating with a native Filipino speaker over email or
• 8:31
  over a text message or chat, they what happens is they end up
• 8:34
  taking the instructions very, very literally. So that's okay,
• 8:37
  but that usually means that you have to be very specific to with
• 8:41
  what you're saying. Fortunately, now you can get virtual
• 8:43
  assistants that are US based and which is great for a number of
• 8:47
  reasons. Obviously, you get native us speakers. You get
• 8:49
  people who have a little bit better cultural context for some
• 8:52
  of the things that you might have them do. Timezone is the
• 8:55
  third one. So that's a dedicated system where you have one person
• 8:59
  you're always talking to them, that you can train them. They
• 9:02
  can learn how you like doing things, who you like to talk to,
• 9:05
  where you like to go for meetings, all that kind of
• 9:07
  stuff. The other side of it is what's known as the on demand
• 9:11
  virtual assistant, and that would be something like fancy
• 9:13
  hands, which I do recommend. It's a great company, and with
• 9:16
  fancy hands, what you get is access to over 3000 assistants.
• 9:19
  And you put your task into a pool so you email it or leave a
• 9:23
  voicemail, and any one of those assistants can pick it up, do it
• 9:26
  and move on prem. Now, the benefit to that is that it's
• 9:29
  usually a lot cheaper, enormously cheaper, to have On
• 9:31
  Demand assistance. You get 24/7, response time, because there's
• 9:34
  always somebody awake that's ready to do something. You get
• 9:37
  much faster response time. Typically within 10 minutes,
• 9:40
  you'll have somebody on something, and you get people
• 9:43
  from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets, the
• 9:46
  downside is that they're limited to tasks that take less than 20
• 9:49
  minutes, because, you know, it just that's the way it is.
• 9:52
  There's no continuity. So if you're not good at describing
• 9:55
  your tasks, then you're going to have an issue. They can't make
• 9:58
  big purchases for you. So what we have now, which is the let's
• 10:01
  do us, is a hybrid. We. Basically have a dozen
• 10:03
  assistants working with us right now, and what you get when you
• 10:07
  work with us is access to the whole team. And because they are
• 10:10
  trained in less doing methodology, they can you can
• 10:12
  work with that team as if it was working with a dedicated
• 10:15
  assistant. So every time they do tasks for clients, they're
• 10:18
  helping create those processes and optimize them. They're
• 10:21
  adding information to a very detailed client dossier, so that
• 10:24
  even if somebody were to quit or get sick or move on whatever,
• 10:27
  then it doesn't matter, because we've created all this knowledge
• 10:31
  base on how to work with that client. And of course, that
• 10:34
  information is transferable to other clients. So what that
• 10:37
  means is that we actually are more like on demand project
• 10:39
  managers, because you could never tell a virtual assistant
• 10:42
  produce a podcast. That's just way too big of a thing. We can
• 10:46
  do that. So what we're trying to, what I've been basically
• 10:48
  trying to position this as, is something that the market is
• 10:51
  missing, where people can say what they want done and we
• 10:54
  figure out the rest, so they don't have to know how to hire
• 10:57
  people or what the best resource is to get particular aspects
• 11:00
  done, we can do that.
• 11:01
  Host: What kind of cost range are you looking for? For this
• 11:05
  kind of thing?
• 11:06
  Ari Meisel: Typically with the Philippines, you're looking at
• 11:08
  between eight and $20 an hour, and you have to look at,
• 11:11
  obviously, a cost benefit analysis in terms of quality of
• 11:13
  the labor and the skill set that you're getting. And you know, if
• 11:16
  somebody's a quarter of the price, but it takes them four
• 11:19
  times as long, or they have to redo it four times. That's
• 11:22
  obviously a problem.
• 11:23
  Host: The question is, how much rework is has to be done? How
• 11:25
  much training, just the fear that somebody else who doesn't
• 11:28
  work in my company every day is going to actually be able to do
• 11:32
  this effectively.
• 11:33
  Ari Meisel: Well and see that, which is one of my favorite
• 11:35
  things to do for people, because I have taken I've never seen a
• 11:39
  process that I could not systematize in a way that
• 11:42
  somebody could do it without any training. And I mean that, you
• 11:45
  know, so from very, very complex processes, too, it's really just
• 11:49
  a matter of breaking it down to its most basic chunks and
• 11:52
  automating as much as possible, by the way, so that there is no
• 11:55
  that, you know, we don't even have to worry about human
• 11:59
  involvement that could possibly mess up something, and then the
• 12:02
  stuff that's left to actually be done by a human is not
• 12:05
  stupefied, but it's really just made into a checklist that is
• 12:09
  easy enough to follow. And doctors, surgeons and pilots,
• 12:12
  who have done procedures 1000s of times, still use checklists
• 12:15
  so that they don't miss things. Proper delegation is when you
• 12:19
  effectively communicate your needs to somebody to the extent
• 12:22
  that they can take it and run with it to the point of being
• 12:25
  able to overcome certain hurdles on their own without having to
• 12:29
  come back to you so that you can go back to doing what you do
• 12:32
  best and not managing that person.
• 12:34
  Host: Interesting. Let's just talk about the inbox. That's the
• 12:37
  big, mammoth beast that everyone struggles with and creates the
• 12:41
  stress for the professional world, and you have the Inbox
• 12:44
  Zero plan.
• 12:45
  Ari Meisel: Yeah, absolutely. So really simple, three Ds. You can
• 12:48
  only deal with an email once, and this, and it's one of the
• 12:51
  three Ds. The first one is to delete it because it's not
• 12:54
  relevant or doesn't require a response. And I would tell you
• 12:57
  that 40% of the emails that people respond to don't actually
• 13:00
  require a response. If you've ever found yourself sending an
• 13:03
  email that said, thanks, or great, don't The second is to
• 13:05
  deal with it. If you can deal with something in the next three
• 13:09
  minutes, deal with it right now, because there won't be a magical
• 13:12
  three minutes later. And I don't mean click it, mark it unread
• 13:15
  and be like, Okay, I'll come right back to it. No. Deal with
• 13:18
  it right now. That could include a little subset D, which will be
• 13:21
  delegating it so you can pass that off to an assistant or a
• 13:24
  spouse or a coworker, and the third one is the most
• 13:27
  interesting. So if you can't delete it and you can't deal
• 13:30
  with it right now, then you need to defer it to a time that you
• 13:33
  can more effectively deal with it. And for that, I recommend
• 13:36
  something called Follow up.cc so you can forward that email to
• 13:39
  8pm at follow up.cc or Thursday at follow up.cc or one week at
• 13:42
  follow up.cc whatever time period you think might make the
• 13:45
  most sense for you to actually be able to effectively deal with
• 13:48
  that, and it will then come back to your inbox at that time so
• 13:52
  that you can and the most effective time to deal with it
• 13:54
  is not just because you have free time. It's also because you
• 13:57
  are maybe in a better state to do that, or because you have
• 14:00
  more information, or whatever it might be, and that's basically
• 14:04
  the strategy.
• 14:04
  Host: Well Ari, I think where do you want people to go to connect
• 14:07
  and learn more about you and all the different things that you
• 14:11
  have going on?
• 14:11
  Ari Meisel: They can just go to lessdoing.com, they can find out
• 14:15
  about the podcast, the book, the blog, everything is there.
• 14:18
  Host: Well, Ari, keep inspiring people and keep preaching the
• 14:22
  good word, my friend.
• 14:23
  Ari Meisel: Always a pleasure to talk to you.