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How I Manage My Time (as an Entrepreneur)

2024-08-13 · Book summary (Book Club) · Ali · recording, 22:38 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Productivity and time, Money and investing) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, His own numbers, His own products discussed, Sponsor segment present

In a Book Club episode on Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time, Ali explains the pain line, the buyback loop, the DRIP matrix and the three trades, then three strategies he uses: an assistant, 10-80-10 delegation and a definition of done with facts, feelings and functionality.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Before the book: never enough time; Dan Martell and Book Club

  • ★★ Before reading Buy Back Your Time about a year earlier, Ali says he always felt short of time while growing his business, stressed and burned out, and the business often suffered for it. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Ali introduces Dan Martell, author of Buy Back Your Time, as a Canadian entrepreneur, founder of Clarity FM and Flowtown, who has apparently made hundreds of millions of dollars in software businesses. (hedged) — 00:00:29
  • ★ Ali presents his summary of Buy Back Your Time as an episode of Book Club, the series in which he has distilled highlights from his favourite books for the last four years. — 00:00:29 · Book Club · first in: 2024-04-16, How to Do More in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months
  • ★★ Dan Martell (quoted): Dan Martell writes that when entrepreneurs hit their pain line, where the daily pain of working on tasks they hate is too great, they either change by embracing new beliefs and tactics or stop growing. — 00:00:58

00:01:15 — The pain line: sell, sabotage or stall; selling SixMed in 2019

  • ★★★ In 2019 Ali sold a majority stake in his first business, SixMed, to a man who is now his friend; he says he sold because he had hit the pain line. — 00:01:48 · 6med

  • ★★ Dan Martell (quoted): Dan Martell calls stalling, deciding not to grow a business that has become overwhelming, a decision to slowly die. — 00:02:46

    “a decision to not grow is a decision to slowly die”

  • ★★★ When a YouTuber's team takes the joy out of making videos, Ali thinks pushing through to a business that lights them up and firing everyone to go back to working alone are both reasonable, depending on their goals. — 00:03:15

00:04:14 — Idea 1: the buyback loop of audit, transfer, fill

  • ★★ Dan Martell (quoted): Dan Martell's buyback loop: keep auditing your time for low-value tasks that drain your energy, transfer them to someone better at them who enjoys them, and fill your time with higher-value tasks that light you up and make more money. — 00:04:20
  • ★★ Since reading Buy Back Your Time about a year earlier, Ali looks at his calendar almost every week and asks what on it he really should not be doing. — 00:05:08
  • ★★ Ali finds that what he enjoys and what makes his business the most money are filming videos and product work on new products; time spent on anything else he tries to delegate, so he can work in his zone of genius. — 00:05:37

00:06:06 — Sponsor read: Hostinger website builder, shown on a VoicePal landing page

  • ★ VoicePal, a new software product Ali's team is working on, is an iOS app that listens as you talk, asks follow-up questions and generates a first draft that sounds like you. — 00:06:35
  • ★★ Dan Martell (quoted): Dan Martell writes that successful people are not doing what they love because they are rich; they are rich because they learned to do what they love and only that. — 00:07:39
  • ★★ Spending your time on what you genuinely enjoy makes you more productive, more creative and less stressed, with more energy for the rest of life, Ali says: the philosophy of his book Feel-Good Productivity. — 00:07:39 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

  • ★★ Joe Hudson (quoted): Ali's friend Joe Hudson, an executive coach, says enjoyment is efficiency: when you enjoy a thing, you are very efficient at it. — 00:07:39

    “enjoyment is efficiency”

00:07:48 — Idea 2: the DRIP matrix of delegation, replacement, investment and production

  • ★★ Ali explains the DRIP matrix from Buy Back Your Time, a two-by-two grid that sorts tasks by whether they light you up and whether they make you money. — 00:08:22
  • ★★ Tasks in the DRIP matrix's delegation quadrant, which you don't enjoy and which don't make much money, are easy to delegate, Ali says, and should go as soon as possible. — 00:08:52

  • ★★ Dan Martell (quoted): Dan Martell's line on delegation, which Ali loves: 80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome. — 00:08:52

    “80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome.”

  • ★ The fear in delegating is that others won't do a task as well as you would yourself, and Ali says that is often true. — 00:08:52

  • ★★★ When Ali hears himself say he doesn't enjoy something but it makes a lot of money, he knows he is in a very dangerous place, the replacement quadrant, where you can stay stuck for a very long time. — 00:10:19
  • ★★ Some corporate speaking gigs make Ali a load of money, but he does not particularly enjoy doing them. — 00:10:19
  • ★★★ Trading enjoyment for money is a siren's call, Ali says: you can have it both ways, because if you focus on things you genuinely enjoy, you can find ways to monetise them. — 00:10:59
  • ★★ Ali's production quadrant, what lights him up and makes lots of money, is filming YouTube videos, giving talks and creating new products; his investment quadrant, what energises him without making much money, is the gym, friends and family, occasional video games and fiction. — 00:11:28
  • ★★ Another mistake entrepreneurs make, Ali says, is spending all their time on high-value money-making tasks and letting their health, hobbies and relationships fall by the wayside; he has fallen into this trap several times. — 00:11:58
  • ★★ Ali would 100% recommend that entrepreneurs read Buy Back Your Time if its ideas resonate with them. — 00:12:27

00:12:41 — Idea 3: the three trades of employee, entrepreneur and empire builder

  • ★★ Of the three trades in Buy Back Your Time, Ali explains, trading money for time is leverage, and trading money for more money, where many entrepreneurs want to get to, is freedom. — 00:13:32
  • ★★ Ali says he is still at level two, trading money for time and in some ways time for money: making YouTube videos is high-income and fairly leveraged, but he has not reached level three, trading money for more money. — 00:13:32

00:14:11 — Shortform affiliate plug

  • ★★ Total freedom comes at level three, when your money makes more money through assets and hired people, and Ali says you have to go through levels one and two, trading time for money and money for time, to get there. — 00:14:11
  • ★ Ali says his business grew from zero to 5 million in revenue and is trying to get from 5 million to 10 million. — 00:14:40

00:14:48 — Strategy 1: get an assistant; the buyback rate; Irem says no for him

  • ★★★ Ali completely agrees with Buy Back Your Time that every entrepreneur needs an administrative assistant, mainly to take the calendar and the email inbox off their plate. — 00:15:29
  • ★★ Ali has had an assistant since about 2020, working over four years with several virtual and personal assistants. — 00:15:29
  • ★★ Ali says he will write issues of his Business Class newsletter in which he and his assistant share the methods they use to work together. — 00:15:29
  • ★★★ Using Dan Martell's buyback rate, yearly profit divided by 2,000 for an hourly rate and then by four, Ali reckons that at a million in profit he should delegate anything he can for less than $125 an hour. — 00:16:03
  • ★★ Ali says he really struggles to say no when people ask him for things, being a nice guy and a people pleaser, while his assistant Irem is very good at it. — 00:16:32
  • ★★★ Ali's assistant Irem tells him, advice he says he needs to follow, to direct anyone who asks him onto a podcast or for anything else to her, so that she can decline. — 00:17:01
  • ★★ Ali's team is incorporating the email-management system of Buy Back Your Time into its email workflow. — 00:17:30
  • ★★ Dan Martell (quoted): Dan Martell writes that an administrative assistant should fully manage your inbox and calendar, so you are never the first person to answer an email or schedule a meeting. — 00:17:30
  • ★★★ Hiring an assistant has been one of the highest-return things Ali has ever done, and he is now massively bullish on it. — 00:17:30
  • ★★ Ali has hired all four of his assistants from his own audience, and points to Athena, a service that places virtual assistants, of which he has heard very good things. — 00:18:00

00:18:13 — Strategy 2: the 10-80-10 rule of delegation

  • ★★★ Ali delegates in his team by the 10-80-10 rule: he does the first 10%, the idea and skeleton, the team does the next 80%, and he adds the final 10% of finishing touches. — 00:19:10
  • ★★ When Ali tried delegating a task a hundred percent, it did not work, because his team needs his input, a skeleton structure, for the task to make sense. — 00:19:10
  • ★★ Dan Martell (quoted): For entrepreneurs who think no one ever does it right, Dan Martell's fix is a definition of done, or DOD. — 00:19:10

00:19:35 — Strategy 3: the definition of done with facts, feelings and functionality; quarterly quests

  • ★★★ For bigger projects Ali's team uses the three Fs of a definition of done, facts, feelings and functionality, which he calls probably the single biggest thing he took from Buy Back Your Time. — 00:20:00
  • ★★ Ali says he was very bad at giving clear instructions; once his team started using the definition of done with facts, feelings and functionality, everything became a lot clearer. — 00:20:53
  • ★★★ Every quarter Ali's team sets quarterly quests, and each project must have a definition of done with facts, feelings and functionality. — 00:20:53
  • ★★ Feelings, Ali's favourite part of a definition of done, is often underrepresented in other goal-setting methods, he says. — 00:21:22
  • ★★ Ali says his team will share templates in the Business Class newsletter over the next few months: how they manage OKRs, run quests and write definitions of done. — 00:21:51
  • ★ Ali still uses his Trident method for time management, and says several entrepreneurs have told him it changed how they manage their time. — 00:22:20 · Trident calendar system

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Buy Back Your Time · Dan Martell · definition of done · DRIP matrix

Also: People: Irem · Joe Hudson · Oprah Winfrey · Warren Buffett

Projects: Book Club · Business Class

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Organizations: 6med · Athena · Clarity FM · Flowtown

Concepts: 10-80-10 rule · buyback loop · buyback rate · pain line · quarterly quest · Trident calendar system · virtual assistant · zone of genius

Products: Loom · Notion · VoicePal

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