How to Have a Better Life without Doing More Work with Alex Sanfilippo

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/140

When you think about excelling in life and business, does your mind automatically drift toward needing to do more work? For most people, they think to get more out of life and business, it requires more from you – But the opposite is, in fact, true. You get more out of life and business by doing less, not more. In today’s episode, I am bringing you another solo episode of the podcast to discuss how to excel both in your personal and professional life without doing more work. Instead, I share how a simple practice can cause you to not only have less on your plate but get more results and fulfillment out of every day of your life. Let’s get into talking about how to make room in your life and business for more results and enjoyment!

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/140

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

You're listening to the Creating a Brand Podcast, where we deliver weekly interviews on topics to help entrepreneurs make their first or next step in business the right one. I am your host, Alex Sanfilippo. When you think about excelling in life and in business, does your mind automatically drift toward thinking that you need to work more? For most people, they think that in order to get more out of life and business, it's going to require more from you. But I've actually found that the opposite is true. You get more to life and business by doing less, not more. And now let's get into talking about how to make more room in your life and business for more results and enjoyment.

UNKNOWN: 1:03

Bye.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08

We'll be right back. lot of progress really fast. Things like we launch a website, we announce it on social media and get a ton of initial traction. We actually launch our product or service and people begin using it. And it could be anything along these lines. The point is, we see a lot of progress. And this is what I call working on the business when this is happening. But then something happens. As we start getting busy and growing, we begin working in the business instead of on the business. And some examples of this would be your CPA calls and says you need to organize your books better. Sorry to my always been a little bit behind on that. Or you need to make more social media content to keep up now with getting more people interested in the business. You need to be checking your email more regularly because of all the support emails that are coming in. You have to work on approving new products or variation of the service that you have. You have to ship products or give tutorials to new customers. And this list could go on and on. And the point is this, we're stuck working in the business instead of on it. And as soon as this happens, our businesses stop growing altogether. All that we're doing now is maintaining what we've already created. And again, this is something that happened to me with my business, Podmatch, but I've also seen this happen in many other entrepreneurs' journey. An example would be when I used to travel around the country to speak at WordPress conferences, many people were there that were actually full-time service providers in the WordPress space. And they talk about how they blew up overnight. They got 20 or 30,000 people downloading their plugin, paying for it, but now they haven't grown in two years because they're stuck just answering support questions all the time. That's all that they're spending their time doing now. I've seen the same thing happen and cripple the best entrepreneurs that I know. It paralyzes us in our business. Instead of having a business that's growing, we're now just working in a job. And it's something that we have to do every single day just to maintain more rat so far. Now, I know this can sound pretty scary. It's like, why would you want to start a business? Because those things I'm mentioning, like working with your CPA, having to make more content, having to answer support emails, those are things we're all going to struggle with, right? So you're thinking like, why would I want to do this? Here's the thing, what I'm describing doesn't have to be you. There is a way around this. And this is something that I learned with my company Podmatch and now podcast SOP, how to be able to do to continue to grow the business. Now I did hit a point where it was a little bit stagnant because I fell into this trap, but thankfully I was able to get out of it. And today I want to be able to explain that to you as well, so that you're able to get more traction in your business and continuously work on it instead of get stuck working in it. So to share this from my personal experience, when I first launched the company, I was making great traction as everyone does, but then I settled into the job So I started working in it instead of on it. And when that happened, my solution was the worst possible option. And it's the one that almost everyone goes for. And it's to work more hours. So you could still do both things, work in the business and on the business. Working more hours is never the right solution. And I'm having to preach this to myself because I'm consistently having to relearn this and make sure that I understand that more hours does not mean more results. At one point, I was actually working more than 60 hours per week. And that just isn't healthy. It's not good for my relationship with God. It's not good for my relationship with my wife or even my friendships or just my general health. It's just too many hours. We're not designed to do that much work. So if your solution that you're thinking in your head so you can be working in and on the business is to just work more hours, I'm telling you it's not a good one. And honestly, it's a bit of a cop-out. It just seems to be the easy way out in our minds. So throughout this episode, I'm going to be challenging you to do something different. What I'm happening is I actually got sick. I got COVID, which many people have gotten, and thankfully it was very mild for me, but I still had to take a few weeks off because my voice, I had this terrible cough and things like that. I couldn't be a podcaster for a little bit there. So I had a lot of downtime So it ended up being about four weeks that I was actually off the grid, if you will, because I wasn't using my voice at all. And I had a lot of free time. I had to reschedule just about every conversation I was having, all my podcast interviews. So I had this free time. And this was the first time in 18 months since starting my business that I decided to walk through an intentional action that I called taking inventory. I was obviously long overdue for this because I got stuck working in the business. So I kind of put things like this off thinking, oh, I don't have that luxury anymore. But the truth is, now that I've done this, and I've seen the result that comes from it, I've realized that I can't afford to not do this. So it's something that I've regularly scheduled in to my schedule. Once again, I'm going to explain how this works. And I'm going to really challenge you to do the same thing instead of just working more hours. To give an example of what it means to take inventory, it's actually something that I was in charge of many years ago when I was in my aerospace job. And what it meant then was we literally just take a few full days, we'd actually shut down the company. And we'd have all the staff come into the inventory stores. And we would count everything been by bin, location by location. We'd open every bag. We'd check every piece of certification. We'd make sure the documents matched up with the part number that's stamped on the part. all that. It was a lot of work. And that's what it means to take inventory. And we just don't do this with our lives because we don't think of it as being something that we need to do necessarily. Our lives are flowing along the way they're supposed to flow. But that's not really true. Just like your inventory is slightly going off course every single day, every single month, every single quarter, no matter how well your company and inventory is managed, it's still happening regardless. And when we think that our lives are not the same as this, that can be a bit of a problem. So the idea here is to get everything displayed in one place and make real-time correction that's the idea of taking inventory so I'm gonna explain now obviously not how to take inventory in an aerospace organization but actually how we can take inventory of our own lives so I encourage you to write down about the share this is how to take inventory and this is both your personal life and professional life so I'm gonna go ahead and run through these things number one is to get away from your normal work environment what I recommend here is actually finding somewhere that inspires you and going there so for me it's actually the beach I live very close to the ocean here in Jacksonville Florida and I enjoy sitting out And that's where I find my inspiration. Now for you, maybe it's the pool, maybe it's the woods, maybe it's on your back porch, maybe it's in a coffee shop where there's other people around if you're a bit of an extrovert. Whatever it might be, the important thing is to get away from your normal work environment and go somewhere that really inspires you. Number two, have no electronics around you. That means no phone, no laptop, no way to be connected to the outside world because here's what's going to happen. You're going to get distracted by those things, and taking inventory only works if it has your full attention. So again, you're in an environment that inspires you, and now you have no electronics around you. And that moves right into number three, which is to take only a pen and paper. Take only a pen and paper. Now, this type of thing scares people. You have pen and paper somewhere in your house, or you can quickly find it very affordably. But it's very important that that's the only thing that you take with you so that you can, again, be very focused. And now number four, obviously, you're thinking is to write something. But before you actually start writing anything down, I want you to close your eyes or if that's too weird because you're in a public place, just sit back and start visualizing yourself in the third person. And what I mean by that is follow yourself around for an entire month, then week, then day. Think about everything you do and how you feel while you're doing those things. And now for number five, in no particular order, start writing down everything you do. everything that's considered work or a commitment that you do any day, week or month. And although we're talking about business in this podcast episode, it's important that you write down everything. So both personal and professional. This is a life practice. This is holistic. You have to get everything written down. So again, you're following yourself around in your mind and you are just writing down everything that you do. And now step six is to repeat the process. I bet you missed more than five things. And after you're done with that, you repeat the process again and then mentally walk through it again. continuously do that until you really feel that you have a holistic list of everything that you are doing, both professionally and personally. The point here is, again, to write everything down. Don't miss anything. When I did this practice, it actually took me three hours and I wrote down 24 different things that I was doing. And now you might say, well, Alex, I'm gonna need my laptop or my phone so I can remember everything that I'm doing. And again, I'm telling you, don't do this. It's actually not helpful. In fact, this is an opportunity to receive a great insight. If you take inventory and you can't think of everything that you do on a given day, week, or month because you need your laptop or phone, you might realize how unimportant certain things are. That would be a red flag in my mind. If you cannot remember that you're doing it, then my question is, why are you doing it when a phone or computer is reminding you to? Do they really matter? I want you to really think about that. I digress on that point. Back to taking inventory. This is the seventh point. Once you finish writing everything down, the next step is to write down how long each of these things takes you to do every week. If it's something you do one a month and takes four hours to do, then just say it's one hour per week. And the idea here is to really figure out how much time you're spending per week on each of these things that you have listed out. So at this point, you should have a list of everything that you're doing both personally and professionally, and also have next to it how much time you're spending doing those things every single week. Hey, Alex Sanfilippo here and I want to take a quick moment to intentionally serve the world with you. Here's what I want you to do. Thank you for your continued support. It means the world to me. And now let's get back to today's episode. And now for my favorite part, this is where things really start to happen. Now you're going to designate an action next to each item that you have listed. So I want you to look at this list that you've built. Again, for me, it was 24 items for you. It might be more, it might be less, but look at all those things you've written down for your life and your business and designate one of the three following actions that I'll mention. Automate, delegate, eliminate. you need to ask yourself this question about each of these things you have listed. How can I automate, delegate, or eliminate what I'm doing? Again, this is the powerful part of this whole thing. This is how you overcome being a busy person and start getting back to working on the business instead of in the business or how you start working on your life instead of in your life. So we need to go through each of these in detail to really make sure that everyone understands how this works. The first of the three things I mentioned is to automate. When you look at any given item, you want to look at it and say, how can I automate this process? Now, I'm going to pick on social here because it's always an easy one but here's something that happens many people they have certain days that they want to post things on social media or certain times they want to do that and so they'll log in they'll post it but then they end up scrolling for way too long and just wasting a lot of time on and that's probably one that everyone is going to write down on this list and what I want to challenge you to do is use one of the scheduling apps there's so many apps that allow you to schedule out your posts and you can even do it native on most social media platforms now that way you don't actually have to go on it to post something you can just share when you need to, or when you have time dedicated to it, and you can batch the rest. That's a very simple example of what it means to automate. Next on the list is delegate. So we have automate, then delegate. This is for things that there's just no way to automate. This is something that you're saying, well, I have to do this. This is just part of the process of what I do. And that's almost never the case. So what you need to ask yourself is how can I outsource this? Can I hire someone to do it? Can I somehow find help where I don't have to do as much of it? The idea is for you to take yourself out of the equation of whatever this is. Now that requires letting go of control in many cases, but that's one of the best things that you can do for your personal life and also for your business. Moving on to the third and final designation. Again, we've got automate delegate. Now we've got eliminate. This is the hardest one for most people, but it's what Dr. Henry cloud calls necessary endings. Sometimes to grow your business or your life, you have to completely let go of something. I call it letting go of the good for the sake of the potential. Great. You don't always know what's on the other side, but what could be is something that's good. And there could be something great right on the other side. So I always tell people, you've got to be willing to eliminate. And again, most people just are not willing to do this. And sometimes you don't even realize that you're doing something that's taking so much of your time because it's become such a habit in your life. You've been doing it for so many years and it's not a bad habit. So it's a good one. You never really focus on it. But if you simply eliminated it, it might not actually do anything negative to your life. You might actually find that the great was just letting go of the good and not even replacing with anything. So again, we've got the three designations here. automate, delegate, eliminate. And during your session of taking inventory, just add the letter A, D, or E next to the item that you have written down. Everything I'm sharing with you right now requires that you get real. It takes deep reflection and you have to ask questions like, what will happen if... What will happen if I automate this? What will happen if I delegate this? What will happen if I eliminate this? Here's the thing. You need to ask yourself those questions while you're going through each item on the list and you're giving it a designation and figuring out how much time it takes. It's really important. And to give a total fictitious example here, here's just something I find that many people that are in similar spaces to where I am are going through. So just walking through this practice, what if I decided to automate my social media using a tool like Buffer? And then I'd have less interruptions. It would save me about two hours per week that I'm wasting on social media right now. What if I delegated my podcast episode to someone else? I pick up three hours a week that I'm using currently to just edit podcast episodes. What if I completely eliminated my YouTube channel? It's not getting a lot of traffic. It wouldn't really hurt my business, I don't think. And it would save me five hours per week coming up with video ideas and actually doing the recordings. Again, this is a fictitious example, but that person would end up saving 10 hours per week just by taking three actions on those things. Again, they automated their social media, they delegated their podcast editing, and they eliminated their YouTube channel. That's 10 hours just off of three of the items. So imagine what this could do for you in your life and in your business. Now there's one more designation that you can use, but I do not recommend it. And it's just the word essential, which means you have to do it and there's no way to automate it. There's no way to delegate it and there's no way to eliminate it. And the The reason I saved this for last and didn't mention what the rest is because everyone just wants to go straight to this one, be like, oh, everything I'm doing is essential, and that's just not the case. I like to think I'm a pretty important person. I run a fairly big company at this point, and I have a second one that's launching, but of the 24 things that I wrote down on my list, only two of them fell into this category, and those two things were both in relation to the strategic visionary level of my business, and the only reason that I put them as essentials is because I've spent hours and hours perfecting this part of my craft. So keep in mind, if you're using the word essential, is a complete cop-out. I don't think that most people should have any of these on their list. I think that everything should be automated, delegated, or eliminated. So please note that this is reserved for people who have achieved true mastery on something. And to be a master of something, it means you have to have been doing it for many, many years and many, many repetitions. So again, it's a cop-out if you use this, unless you can truly say, I am a master at this. So to quickly recap the four designations that you have, first is essential. No change. It means it stays the same. No action. Again, do not use this one. The next three are automate, which means to automate part of the process, delegate to find someone else who can do it for you, or eliminate, which means to let go if it's something that's holding you back or even if it's something that's just good but not great. So I want to do a quick call to action here. And here's the thing. What I'm sharing with you here is not some magic practice. Once you've done this inventory session and you see everything written down, you've got the list of 24 more or less things, you've got how long it takes you to do each week, and you've got the designated letter next to it so you know what you're going to do. That doesn't actually do anything. What has to happen at that is you have to put things on your calendar. You have to put them down in your notepad. It's an intentional action to make something happen based off the list that you created. And here's a couple examples. You're going to have to have hard conversations with your friends, with your family, with your co-workers. You're going to have to stop doing things that you've been doing for many years just because they are part of your life. You're going to have to let go of some of your past babies slash side projects that you always like to work on. And you're going to have to be willing to get uncomfortable in this process. And I call all these things necessary endings, as I mentioned before. You're giving up the good for the sake of the potential great. You're giving up work for margin. This is how you can be less busy. This is how you can make true traction and progress in your business and in your life. So for me, when I did this practice, again, I had the 24 things listed out and I went through this designation with each of them and began applying. I began putting on my calendar to make sure that I actually started removing them. I actually had the tough conversations. I did all of that. I ended up saving 27 hours per week, 27 hours per week. And not only that, but now I'm actually seeing more progress in everything that I do. So I'm focused more on what matters and I'm actually doing all the things that I need to be doing and know that the great things in my life, I'm doing them faster. I'm investing more time in relationship with God, with Alicia, and with our meaningful friendships. All that is happening as a result of me, again, taking inventory and then taking action to remove those things from my life, or if not remove, at least automate or delegate those things. So again, my call to action to you is to make sure that you take action on what it is that you need to do. Simply writing these things down is not enough. You have to make the decision to automate, delegate, and eliminate the things in your life, add it to your calendar, set reminders, have the conversations that you need to have, make the adjustments you need to make. You have to be willing to take action in order to see these results happen. Before ending this episode, I want to quickly mention that by doing this intentional action of taking inventory and applying it to your life, you are actually raging war with the world. I've noticed that the world has a cadence about it. And when you break free of how the world naturally progresses or wants things to happen in your life, you Weird things start happening. And I'm not trying to over spiritualize this, but we have to know that there is a spiritual element in the world, whether you believe in heaven and hell or whatever it might be. There is a spiritual side of the world. And what I've realized is that when we try to break free of what the world wants for us. things happen that are irregular so example if you've ever gotten a bonus or raise or had just a bunch of free time show up bad things happen or things that you just don't usually have happened like your car will break down there'll be a health issue something your business will break and i'm not trying to be negative here but this is completely true i've never met anyone who does not agree with what i'm sharing right now so when you try to break free of the natural rhythm which is busy rhythm that the world has for you you're raging war against it and it is going to fight back and i say all this just to let you know that things are going to happen to try to hinder you from getting this new margin in your life and in your business and you have to be willing to fight you have to be willing to say no I'm going to fight to have this happen I had a bunch of things happen as soon as I started trying to free up my time and again I'm not trying to spiritualize this but this is going to happen so know that you are raging war by doing this so when you take inventory you write down the designations you put in your calendar take action know that there will be some pushback that the world is going to bring your way but it's totally worth it because once you break free of it the world seems to release you from it and you can live at a high the highest level that I believe anybody is capable of. So as I end this episode now, I want to really challenge you to not fill your time with more stuff. You need to leave room and make some margin in your life. We live in a world where people are afraid of being bored or having nothing to do or even just being left alone with our thoughts. But if there's one piece of wisdom I can share with you today, it's this. You'll find yourself, you'll find God, you'll find purpose, you'll find fulfillment by actually making this margin in your life and not filling it with something else. Now, things that people might feel with is like, oh, great. I got all this extra time. I'm going to watch another show. I'm going to binge this. I'm going to start playing video games or I'm going to go do this. Don't do that. Don't fill the time. Sit back. Relax. Do something outside. Get away from screens with the extra time you have. Do some deep reflecting on your life. I promise you, you will live a more fulfilled life because of it. So now that we've talked through all this, I want to encourage you to not just take inventory one time and then just forget about it. I actually want you to make this a quarterly process. And I want you to put it in your calendar now. Like as you're listening to this, take out your calendar and put it in your calendar for three months from now. And if you haven't scheduled your first one, schedule the first one, immediately schedule the next one three months down the road. Take this time to get deep, to get real with yourself, to take action and implement over the next 90 days, then repeat. And I'm telling you, by putting this practice into action and continuously going through this, you will become the I want to end with a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt. The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experiences to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. If you want to continue to see results in your life and business, I encourage you take action today. What I've shared with you today will help. I believe it'll change your life completely. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you as always for listening. I'm looking forward to bringing you another interview masterclass episode next week.