Five Elms Roundtable on Adopting Systems and Tools For More Efficient Communication, Meetings, and Planning

I will go ahead and get us started. I know there’ll be some other people trickling in and you guys will all have access to a recording of this session to kind of revisit or distribute as you need to. So we are joined today by Nick Sonnenberg, CEO and founder of Leverage, which is an operational efficiency consultancy. So over the course of his career, he’s helped companies including ClickFunnels, Benevity and the Project Management Institution.

He is a serial entrepreneur, columnist, guest lecturer at Columbia and author of the book that you’ll see behind him, Come Up for Air, How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work, which was a Wall Street Journal bestseller. And I believe in the links that you guys have received already and will receive after, you guys will get access to that as well. So Nick, I will kick it over to you.

Thank you for the intro and nice to meet everyone. We’ve got about an hour together and I have some slides and some content that I’ve prepared, but I want this to be interactive. So if you have a question, you want to go a bit deeper, feel free to unmute, you can interrupt me. We’ll have plenty of time for Q& A at the end. But I’m hoping that in the next 60 minutes, you learn at least one new way of thinking, one new strategy, one new anything that hopefully can help make work easier and save time.

I respect time greatly and I’m sure that all of you are busy. Being an executive in a company, we’re all busy. And so taking an hour out of your day, I know is a big ask. So my promise to you is I’m going to make this worthwhile and give you back more time than you’re spending on this call. Sound good? All right. Sounds like a plan. I’m guessing that you’re here because you either want to increase your profit, your time or your freedom or all of the above. Is that fair to assume? All right.

And I’m guessing too that all of you know what it feels like you’re either currently drowning in work or have drowned in work. That fair? Well, we all have been there. I’ve been there myself. That’s why I wrote a book called Come Up For Air, how your team can leverage systems and tools to stop drowning in work because I know firsthand what it’s like to drown in work. So all the tips and tricks and techniques I’m going to be sharing with you, it’s not because I’m some guru genius that just one day had an epiphany and thought about these things.

Everything I’m going to be sharing is created out of personal need and experience. My background, I’m a former high- frequency trader on Wall Street, so I have an engineering background. So I can’t help but try to build stuff and solve problems. And after I got out of high- frequency trading, I got into startups and the initial version of my company was a freelancer marketplace.

And all of you are operators, so you can appreciate what it’s like to bootstrap and scale to seven figures in the first 12 months, but you probably also can appreciate how there’s probably a lot of broken shit under the hood. Are we allowed to cuss on this thing? I’m not a cusser, but anyway, we grew fast. We grew too fast to the point where we had like 150 people on the team in the first 12 months and we were growing 20% a month, but that was 20% new clients in with 15% churn. So we had good marketing masking a broken product.

It was just a ticking time bomb. One day I’m working with my now ex- business partner and I’m holding a coffee and he comes and taps me on the shoulder and he tells me he’s out. Not in two weeks or two days, he’s out in two minutes. And so I’m sitting there holding my coffee and I go white thinking, holy crap, we’re going to go bankrupt. Because not only did we have this big churn problem, but the bigger problem was no one even knew who I was. I was the behind the scenes person and he was the front of scenes person.

So the 500 clients, the 150 team members, there was less than half a dozen people that even knew who I was. So in that moment, I had to decide, do I bankrupt this company or do I try to figure out how to make this thing work? And ultimately I had a vision for how to make it work and I decided to stick it out, but it was tough. We lost like 40% in a three month period. I’m cashing out my 401k and my dad’s taking a second loan on his house to loan me money for payroll. I mean, it was a complete cluster.

And the biggest limiting factor to fix a lot of these problems that I had was time. With enough time, I knew I could fix all these things, but just like it takes money to make money, it kind of is the same with time. It takes time to make time. And when you’re working already 16 hours a day, putting out fires and you’re working in your business, where do you find the time to work on your business?

So it was just like spinning on this hamster wheel, like, okay, I need to find time because it’s gonna be impossible to fix this trend problem and to re- navigate the Titanic here if I don’t have the space to think about these things and to really make shifts. So…

In the 16 to 20 hour kind of period of a day, work day, for a little period of time, I was analyzing where time was being wasted. And I kind of broke it down into these three buckets. The first bucket was communication. By the time I responded to all the pings and dings from my team, from clients, half the day, maybe even more than half the day was already shot. The next bucket where I was seeing that we were wasting a lot of time was what I call now planning. But what I mean by planning is I couldn’t just click a button and know who’s working on what.

What’s past due that I asked someone to work on? What’s the status of this key project? What should I do today? You know, typically to answer those questions, you have to go back to the communication tools and start texting and emailing and Slack messaging. But I couldn’t just click a button and quickly get answers. I had to go on the scavenger hunt and that was eating up a significant amount of time. And then the third bucket, I was already doing a decent job of this, but that was all about documenting knowledge, what I call resources.

You know, where are the SOPs, where are the processes? I knew that to be a high performing team, I needed to be able to click a button and be able to retrieve any type, you know, how do I onboard a new person? What’s the process to do this thing? Luckily, I had the foresight to document that because if my partner left and I didn’t have some of these things documented, I for sure would not be here speaking to you. I would have gone bankrupt.

So going back to it, these three buckets, communication, planning, and what I call resources, I started focusing on these things and very quickly things started shifting. And simultaneously people started reaching out to me, asking me to consult with them. So Tony Robbins reached out, Poopery reached out, Poopspray, Ethereum reached out, just all by word of mouth. People started hearing that I was doing some interesting stuff with technology that was kind of transforming the workforce and how work was being done, especially in a remote environment.

This is prior to the pandemic. And the same stuff that was helping leverage my company start saving time and moving in the right direction was as impactful, but probably even more impactful because the bigger your team, the more you benefit from this stuff. For a Poopspray, a cryptocurrency company, a world famous coach, it didn’t matter. Every company, didn’t matter the size of the industry, had to communicate with people internally and externally. You had to plan, you had tasks and projects and work that needs to get done.

And you have resources, you have knowledge, you have intellectual property, you have processes, you have SOPs, your core values, your vision, all these things are part of your business that needs to be easily accessible, right? So every single one of you on this call has those three buckets to be thinking about to be a high- performing, efficient organization. So ultimately, the light bulb went off and I realized, hey, the real opportunity here is teaching this stuff to people.

So then we did a hard pivot and now, I wrote a book about it, come up for air, you might wanna check it out. And then my company, Leverage, now what we do is we do operational efficiency training and consulting for organizations just like yours to teach them best practices of not just how, but when to use all of these different kind of core fundamental tools that is commonly used in the workplace, yet there’s just no training.

So the slides and the presentation is gonna be mindset, but also more about this framework that you can go and roll out with your team today to be a high- performing team, sound good? All right, I’m gonna share my screen. Okay, oops, all right, great. All right, what I would like to do is let’s kick this off and take out your phone and scan that QR code and in one or two words, I’d love to hear from you where you feel like you’re wasting the most time so we can tailor this conversation to this specific group.

So if your issue is email, don’t say too many emails or spam email, just say email. Like let’s just try to keep it to one or two words so we can form a word cloud and see some patterns. Okay, we got Slack.

Communications, Slack, responding to DM, all right. So it seems like communication is a big theme with this group, meetings. Distractions probably goes hand in hand with the issues with Slack. Miscommunications, if someone would be willing to unmute that put miscommunication and maybe just give a little bit more color on what type of miscommunication.

Is it miscommunication like you were expecting them to deliver something by Friday and they don’t deliver it or is it miscommunication in terms of the tone that you’re writing to them in Slack that’s misinterpreted? Like what, let’s get a little bit more specific on that.

I put miscommunication where I was coming from. It was more like misunderstanding. So intention is not always, intention is not always there when people are saying things or I will start operating under assumptions based on what was communicated to me and I’ll respond with a deliverable and then it turns out that’s not what they wanted.

Gotcha.

I also, hi, nice to meet you. I also wrote miscommunication. In my case is between different departments. I’m a tech guy. So many of the times is that we’re a tech company and when we speak about technology with other departments, it is not always clear what we’re saying.

So it is- Do you have any specific, can you give me like a recent example?

A recent example is, well, I don’t have one now, but for example, when we speak about a feature and you can see that maybe your colleagues don’t even tested it. And so you’re speaking about something concrete and you can see that they don’t understand that. And once later in the day, so you see that they understood something completely different.

And is that because they were supposed to do something that they didn’t do?

Yeah.

And let’s then understand why didn’t they do it? Is it because the way it was delegated, you don’t have a good system to delegate and manage work? Was it delegated to them over a text, email or Slack message that just gets lost?

I think this is a part of the problem.

Okay.

It’s also the delegation, yeah.

Yeah. So I think that especially for you, some of the things that we’re going to be talking about is really critical, right? Because different tools are built for different purposes. And a common thing that we see is what you’re describing, but it’s not because these people are bad people. You know, trust, there’s different dimensions to trust. You could trust that someone is ethical. They’re not going to steal from you.

You could trust that they have good intentions, but you might not trust that they’re going to test that feature that you’re talking about, right? So a lot of the stuff that we’re discussing here with efficiency does trickle into culture, right? Because when you start not trusting that your colleagues are going to, you know, say one of those three dimensions of trust, if you don’t have all three, friction’s going to start popping up and you’re going to have negative culture impacts.

And these people that aren’t testing it, most likely it’s not because they don’t want to test it or they purposely didn’t. It’s probably due in large part to an operational efficiency issue and they don’t have a good system to capture and prioritize. So things slip through the cracks. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Okay.

All right, great.

So, and then some of these issues that you’ve put here with Slack, we’ll get into some best practices with Slack. Oftentimes when we see problems with Slack, it has to do with notification settings, not understanding when to use Slack versus a project management tool, not having a strategy for naming conventions of channels, not having a strategy for when a channel should be private versus public. So before you know it, everyone’s added to all these public channels.

I mean, when I was consulting for Ethereum, they had sometimes a thousand people in a channel, public. Everyone’s curious about everything. So you have people on the West Coast in channels for the Brooklyn office channel. And now everyone on the West Coast knows that Jimmy got locked out of the office down in Brooklyn, right? A one- off doesn’t make a huge impact to the business, but at scale, when you’re distracting a hundred people every time Jimmy’s locked out of Brooklyn, it starts adding up. So we’ll get into some of these best practices.

So how long does a one- day task take you right now? Unmute yourself. If I were to give you a task right now that should take a day to complete, how long will it take you?

Two days. Two days. Okay. That’s pretty quick. Probably three to five days. A week. Three to five days.

A week.

A week is probably what we see as the average. You know, in general, when we ask this to people, the answer is it depends. And what does it depend on? It depends on your utilization, how busy you are, right? Like how much of a bottleneck or a backlog of stuff do you have, right? So if you’re 0% busy, a one- day task takes a day.

Okay.

Someone said two days, so that wouldn’t, I think it was Antonio. So Antonio, I guess that means that you’re 50% busy if you think it would take you two days right now. And then if you’re 80% busy, that’s where it takes a week. That’s probably the healthy place to be, right? You don’t want to be too free where you’re sitting there twiddling your thumbs waiting for stuff, but you don’t want to be so busy, right? If you get to 90%, it gets to 10 days. You can see this is exponential.

If you or your colleagues are feeling chaos, it’s probably because you’re living in that north of 90% busy land. And look, if you’re 100% busy, a one- day task takes infinity, right? So you want work to flow in some type of clear fluid process. And again, you don’t want your team to be too free, but you don’t want them to be completely drowning so they don’t have a little bit of breathing room to handle the new flow of work. Is this making sense?

So most likely for you, probably in that 70% to 80% bucket of busy is probably some type of optimal that you want to be shooting for. And my job in terms of what we do as a business and this presentation is how can I free up an extra say 10, 20, 30% of your busy that was just completely used on nonsense that adds no value or joy to your life or to your business. So now you have a little bit more breathing room to handle the new higher level stuff that is going to actually make an impact.

It turns out that a significant amount of your day and your team’s day is spent on pure crap. On average, 84 minutes a day is spent looking for disorganized information. About an hour is spent switching between things. And another 30 minutes is deciding on what tool to use for what purpose. So a huge amount of time is just completely useless. And another way of describing this busy percent is how much capacity do you have? And a big myth that I often see with clients is the biggest misconception is if you want to increase your capacity, what do you do?

You hire more people. It’s often nine out of 10 is probably too low. It’s probably like 99 out of 100 times. Hiring people is the worst way to increase your capacity. And here’s why. There’s the obvious costs. You have to pay to train someone, recruit them, onboard them. You pay a salary. But the biggest cost, that’s the invisible cost, is this complexity. Have you ever hired someone thinking, this is going to solve all my problems, right? I just need one more person to do this. And like all of a sudden, it’s just going to free up all this time.

And then you find that you’re still drowning in work just as much, if not more so, than you were before. Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt that. Yep.

All right.

I see James. All right. Yeah. That’s because this complexity factor. This is a pretty interesting graph, I feel. If you right now are a three- person team, each node is a person, three ways information can transfer. If you then grow to a five- person team, you now all of a sudden have 10 ways information can transfer. And if you’re a 10- person team, this is what it looks like. You’ve got 45 ways information can transfer. So just drop in the chat. If you think you have the biggest team, drop in the chat, and we can discuss the complexity of that.

Okay, so Jessica’s got four. All right, so four is going to be somewhere between the three and the 10. All right, four should be six ways to connect. Seven should be, what’s that, 15 ways to connect. Here’s the benefit. The smaller you are, the easier it is to make any change. The smaller you are, the less complexity you have, the simpler that graph looks. So everything that I’m all about is maximizing your revenue per team member, your profit per team member. More people is more problems. It’s like that whole too many cooks in the kitchen.

It’s the same thing. Hire as a last resort, not a first resort. And I can guarantee you, every single one of you, you are sitting on at least 20%, if not up to 40% of untapped potential in every person in your team. I’ve done this with thousands of people. Every single person that we’ve ever worked with has a quick 20% they can get out of each person. And then you save all the costs that you’re about to spend on the hiring, the onboarding, the recruiting, and you keep the complexity factor as small as possible for as long as possible.

The bigger your team is, the more you play this game of hot potato. You’re working a 12- hour day, and it’s just like, here, take it. And you’re saying to James, here, James, and it’s a text to James. It’s an email to Hillary. And there’s no rhyme or reason. It’s whatever’s quickest to you in the moment. And this issue of playing this hot potato gets exponentially more costly and negative impact to your business the bigger you are. Rather than passing the hot potato, how do you pass the baton?

When you add more people to an inefficient system, it makes the entire thing less efficient. I would encourage all of you, if you can, do a temporary hiring freeze after this. Focus on your internal efficiency, and give that a few months, and then go back and think, do you really need to hire some more people? Now, obviously, I don’t know your businesses. There might be specific things. You might have had your lead developer just quit, and now no one’s building your backend. So I’m not telling you, it’s not hard and fast here.

But if you’re hiring people because you need more capacity, I would interview and invite you to really take a look at how efficient do you think each person is and focus on that. The second thing that oftentimes people say is, okay, well, maybe if I hire superstars, then it makes sense to hire people. Does anyone recognize who this is in the picture? So this is Coach Larry Brown. He is the only coach in history, I believe, who have won an NCAA championship and an NBA championship.

And you can see in the background, you’ve got LeBron James, you’ve got Carmelo Anthony. I think it’s fair to say these are superstars, right? But in 2004, they came together in the Olympics. They get blown out by Puerto Rico in game one, and they end up winning the bronze medal. So how is it that you throw together a whole bunch of superstars and they can’t win, right? It’s not enough to have a bunch of people that are individually superstars. It’s not enough to have individuals even that are productive.

Individual productivity is necessary, but it’s not sufficient for a team to be productive. There’s a whole other layer of complexity. It requires collaboration. It requires coordination. Sometimes individuals have to sacrifice their own productivity for the greater good of the team. So this US basketball team, they were thrown together three months before the Olympics. They weren’t well- coordinated. They didn’t know how to work well together.

And even though each person was a superstar, they got blown out by these teams that had been working together for years and years and years. Sorry, did someone unmute? Does someone have a question? Okay. All right. Myth number three, work harder. I think that one’s quite straightforward. Asking your team just to work 100 hours a week, that’s not scalable. People are gonna burn out and quit, and that’s gonna leave you in a tough spot, okay? So I’m all about, instead of working harder, how can you just work smarter?

And again, I can guarantee you’ve got 20 to 40% of untapped potential per person in your team, okay? So my book, it’s about 300 pages long, a lot of actionable tips and tricks, but I’m gonna give you the spoiler of the underpinning concept of the whole book. To be a high- performing team, you have to completely change the strategy that you have right now. So right now, you’re probably optimizing to just send stuff to each other fast, right? That’s the hot potato, right? Hey, Jolene, here’s the report. Hey, James, can you get this done by Friday?

And you’re just optimizing to get stuff off your plate and to transfer information as fast as possible. Instead, what I’m gonna tell you to do, though, if you wanna be a high- performing team, is instead of optimizing to send stuff fast, you optimize to find stuff fast. It’s a completely different mindset. It means that each of you have to take pause and put things in the right drawer where it belongs. And my job is to teach you what the different drawers are that you need in your business and how to use these drawers.

And if you do that and you completely flip on its head the strategy from sending to wanna finding.

That’s where you’re going to save exponential time. Because it’s the invisible slippage of efficiency is when something should take you 30 seconds and then 30 minutes later, you’re still looking for that document. If you can avoid all those landmines, you’re going to save half a day to a full day a week guaranteed. And you’re already thinking about this stuff in your personal life. The fastest way to be done with your laundry would be you take it out of the dryer and you just throw it in a drawer like this. That’s the fastest way.

If you’re just optimizing to do stuff quick, to transfer stuff, this is what your chest of drawers would look like. But instead, for the most part, you probably invest the time just like you invest money, you invest time. You probably invest the time separating socks in one drawer, underwear in another drawer. And you do that not because it’s the fastest way to be done with your laundry. You invest that extra minute because you know that tomorrow when you need to grab an outfit, you’re going to save a bunch of time putting together that outfit.

Is this making sense? So in business, it’s just a bit more complicated. You got all these drawers. You have internal communication drawers, external communication drawers, a drawer for where your tasks and projects go, a drawer for your SOPs. But it’s important that you and your team are playing the same game. And you’re using the same chest of drawers. And you don’t have different ideas of where the socks go and where the underwear goes and where the T- shirts go. Everyone knows what drawer to look in.

If you can align your team on that, you’re going to save half a day to a full day a week. Now take out your phone again and let’s just see where you’re at. Basic question, theoretical example, like say you need a team member to do something for you by Friday. What tool would be your go- to tool to delegate that task to them? All right, well, I can see why we have an issue with Slack. It’s because you’re using Slack when you probably shouldn’t be using Slack.

All right, so what’s interesting here is three quarters of you, three quarters of the group would use a communications tool to delegate work or to delegate a task. So each tool has a different purpose. Communication tools are great for communicating. Hey, James, welcome to the team. Or, hey, everyone, we’re hiring Leverage to help us with our efficiency. Or quick question, if you need to give someone something like, hey, Nick, can you get this done by Friday? That’s why there’s tools like Asana Monday ClickUp.

That’s the purpose of a work management tool. They’ve invested billions, literally billions of dollars to solve that use case where you can click a button and know, what do I need to do today, right? You can click another button and know what’s past due. Click another button. What’s the status of this project? And you can still talk because they have commenting, but it’s all in one container that’s easy to find. Because again, the name of the game is optimizing to retrieve stuff.

It’s not easy to retrieve information if a third of the conversations over random texts, and then you’ve got email chains going on. And then there’s a direct message in Slack. And then another message inside of a Slack channel. And before you know it, you’ve got to stitch all these things together. And now someone quits, let’s say, in the middle of that. And then good luck. You know, you basically you’re just starting from zero, right? So you can avoid all that.

And if you invest the time just creating that task up front and keeping it organized, everyone knows where to look. And you don’t have to start wasting time stitching together four different tools to get a full 360 on what’s going on.

Okay.

According to Asana, over half of your time is spent on work about work. That is going on a scavenger hunt looking for disorganized information. That’s distractions from bad notification settings. That’s inefficient meetings. That’s inefficiently using email. That’s yada, yada, yada. When you add it all up, over half of your time is spent on work about work. And again, super quick to fix some of this stuff. It’s a never ending journey, right? All these tools are constantly changing. There’s new tools. There’s new functionality. Sorry.

There’s new functionality, there’s new ways of thinking about using these things. So it’s a never ending journey. But I can guarantee you within a few months, if you invest in this stuff, you can be a completely different looking team. Also, I’m sure this has happened to you. But you ever get a direct message on Slack, or whatever tool you get a direct message on Slack, then 510 30 minutes later, you get another message, but now it’s on text like, Hey, just want to make sure you saw that Slack message, right? And then you also get an email.

So then you start getting tripled up on the notifications. And it’s it’s a lose lose. Because now, you just had to look at something three times instead of once. And the other person on the other end, they don’t like sending that message. They’re doing it out of survival and anxiety. So it’s this lose lose, they’ve wasted time, and they’ve caught they’ve got anxiety. You feel micromanaged, and you’ve wasted time.

And so when you start adding up the total time of just slippage and wasted, wasted time slash this like, death by 1000 cuts of culture impact. It’s just a lose lose. Okay, so the three buckets again, you’ve got communication, you’ve got planning, and you’ve got resources. So within communication, this is the, if you were to just take away one thing, it’d be clean up your communication. And you even said in the the word cloud, Slack is the number one thing, right? Clean up how you communicate. And that starts with when to use each tool.

And then the second layer to that is how to use it. But it all starts with when, okay? So I would, and everything I’m going to be sharing with you are just general guidelines. If you’re, if your buildings on fire, and you’re getting robbed, you just do whatever it takes. So I’m giving you the 99% use case, but you still have to apply judgment. But in general, you want to keep text and WhatsApp. Keep that for personal, stop, stop using out with your team, right?

Let them be able to, you know, if they have to work, they’re going into work tools on the weekend, or if they want to go on a vacation, they can be looking at their text and not worried that it’s going to start, they’re going to start getting hit up with work stuff. Not to mention, you know, we’ve all been there before, where that person quits, or you hire a new person. And now everything’s in text, and you got to start from scratch. So things like text, it’s terrible for team communication.

Then you’ve got email, I would recommend keeping this for external. So this for your clients or your third party partners. So stop sending emails to your team, except with the exception, if you have to forward an email, that’s fine. And then keep things like Slack or teams keep that for internal. But again, there’s a difference between communication and planning. But you want to utilize Slack for internal. And this is all about the when the next layer again, as you want to use Slack properly with the naming conventions, the channels, yada, yada, yada.

But it starts with just having an alignment with your team on the different use cases of when you use each category of tool. Now, you may or may not be using Slack to its highest or best use. But Slack, you have third party integrations.

So if you start integrating it with your CRM, with Zapier, with Stripe or your payment processor with all these different tools, you can really convert it into this like command center of information where you don’t even have to leave it and you can start getting notified on the things that you care about and strategic channels. Not to mention, if you need to hire a new person, now you just add them to that channel and they can see a history of that topic. Back to the whole optimizing to find stuff, not send stuff.

If you have channels by a topic, if you need to go and find a conversation rather than looking back through a thread with an individual person where you have to start scrolling through a thousand conversations, you could do command K, which is the shortcut to search in Slack. You know, finance. Okay, now all the finance channels. Okay, this is finance, bookkeeping or taxes, whatever the topic is.

And now you’re in the channel talking about your 2023 taxes versus having to scroll through a bunch of emails and text messages with a whole bunch of random people on your team. Cool. And if you fire your accountant, you just add the new one to that channel. Okay, now email. This is probably one of the biggest misused tools. Email is just an external to- do list that other people can add to. And you’ve probably heard of the term inbox zero. Most people have a different definition than I do of inbox zero.

Most people, if you think you’re at inbox zero, you probably are thinking you are because you’re at unread zero, but you probably have thousands and thousands and thousands of emails in your inbox that just are sitting there unread. That’s not zero. You’ve got thousands and thousands of emails. Inbox zero is regardless if it’s read or unread, you’ve got less than 20, 30 emails in your inbox. I don’t believe that getting to zero, zero, zero is efficient because that means you’re in your email too much.

You know, it’s like you’re not going to do your laundry every time one pair of socks gets dirty. Like you don’t need to deal with your email every time one pops up. You want to wait for the bin to get full and then do a batch.

So, but you don’t want it to get too full and you have 30, 000 emails and now you can’t find anything. So you want to get a grip on it. Usually 20 to 30 is probably a reasonable number. And at leverage, probably the most, probably the most impactful thing that we teach is inbox zero, like depending on volume of email, that could be a half a day a week for you if you’re getting hundreds of emails a day. Something that most people don’t know is there’s about a dozen or so tricks that you have to know with email to get to zero.

But a quick win with email that you probably aren’t utilizing is the snooze button. So that is a button built into Gmail and then a lot of versions of Outlook where you could, you could hit the clock and an email disappears and comes back on whatever day you want. And if someone replies to you in the meantime, it deactivates the snooze and goes to the top. So you could think about a lot of different use cases for that, you know, like driving directions to a client’s office. You don’t need that email sitting there for a month.

Snooze it to the morning of that meeting, you know, etc. You also now with email, there’s so much you can do with AI. So I’m going to share with you really quickly something I built the other week. And don’t worry, I’m not going to be putting you on some, you know, drip sequence for the next 10 years. But I’m going to share with you a form in a second if you want to participate, totally optional. But I think it’s a pretty cool use case of how to use AI with email. And in this example, what I’ve done is I’ve used an automation tool called Zapier.

And if you’re not familiar with Zapier, Zapier kind of connects third party tools together. It’s like the glue between third party softwares to automate things. So we use HubSpot as our CRM. And so the trigger is I’m going to show you a HubSpot form. And if you want to take a look at how this works, when you fill out that form, it’s going to send your response to an assistant and chat GPT. Recently, chat GPT just came out with this feature called an assistant where you can train this assistant on your content.

So I have an assistant that’s trained on operational efficiency. I’ve uploaded my book. I’ve uploaded previous sales emails that we’ve done. I’ve uploaded our brand and tone guidelines. I’ve uploaded all of this stuff. So when you fill out that form, it sends your response to chat GPT and it says, hey, based off of everything you already know about me, how would you respond to help this person on this issue? And then what it does is it takes the answer that chat GPT does. It formats it in an HTML formatting and then it sends you back an email.

It’s pretty cool. And it only took only took about a few hours to do that. So if you want to take a look, I’ll give you a minute scan that either scan that QR code or you can go to form. getleverage. com and you can see what type of quality response you get from from the AI. And then optionally, if you think there’s an automation to set, you don’t have to worry about booking a call. If you do want to talk to my team, it navigates you to that. But I just want you to see what you can do with AI automation and email in this new era of work.

Say give you another minute to do

that.

Everyone good. Anyone need more time?

Okay. So

that was all the C communication. Any questions so far with communication? Okay. So then the second part of CPR is planning. Here are some of the common tools. We have a partnership with Asana. We’re biased. We like Asana the best. I could go in deeper why I like Asana better than the others. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. The biggest difference is that you that whatever tool you use, first you understand when to use it. And then the next is you’re using it to its highest and best use.

The difference between Asana versus Monday versus ClickUp. It’s a few percentage points.

Okay, so when you properly use these types of tools, like I can click a button and I can know who on my team has capacity and who doesn’t have capacity. I can click another button and I can know what’s the status of all of Jessica’s projects.

Right.

And if I care to, you know, see specifically what’s going on on our, you know, Idaho mastermind event, I can go and click into that and I can see what she’s doing there if I care. But I can keep it high level and just know that the four projects she’s on, they’re all in good shape. I can click another button and I can know what’s the status of the company goals. Okay, so these different tools answer different questions. And the purpose of a work management tool is to be able to answer those types of questions or even as basic as what should I do today?

Right.

I can’t click a button in Slack and answer that.

Okay.

Now, someone had put meetings in the word cloud and a quick win that you can do. And this kind of goes hand in hand with your work management tool. But optimize your meetings. Meetings probably adds up to 25 to 50% of your work week. And there’s some quick wins that you can do to make meetings more efficient. If you think about the cost of a meeting, meeting is a function of the total number of people in that meeting.

How often the meeting is, you know, I can guarantee you if you look at your calendar right now, there’s probably recurring meetings that have been recurring for months or years. And if you were to take a step back and say, hey, does this really need to be every week? Could we do it every other week? Probably there’s some that you could start thinking about reducing the frequency. Also, there’s probably meetings that are just defaulted to an hour that could probably be done in 45 minutes.

And if you have four people on a call that you can reduce by 15 minutes, you just got an hour back for the company. Okay. And then the last thing is use an agenda. Oftentimes meetings are really inefficient and ineffective. You don’t cover what needs to get covered. And if you use an agenda, the benefits that you’re going to see is one, you’ve now given people a place to store an idea. So Slack was the number one thing you guys that you said in the word cloud.

A big problem that’s probably happening, if I had to guess, is every time someone has an idea, they’re sending a message in Slack. And if there’s a meeting and you have an agreed upon structure for agendas, you could instantly just change the culture in your company and say, hey, look, at our company, at company ABC, if something’s not urgent, it can wait till next week and we have a meeting. Don’t Slack me, put it in the agenda and we’ll talk about it there. That’s back to that whole laundry example.

It’s not that every time someone has a brilliant idea, they need to tell you. Let it stack up and batch go over it on an agenda. And you’ll probably find half of the things that people wanted to talk about self- resolve and you just avoided all the pings and dings that were happening inside of your Slack. And you can use tools like Monday or ClickUp or Asana and you can have projects for agendas.

So I have for every direct report on my team, I have a one to one project where if I need to delegate something to them that doesn’t tie to a project, I put it in there. But we also have an agenda section. So when I go and do my one on ones with them, we’re just going through the list that we’re both adding to this to this project. And the cool thing with doing an agenda inside of your work management tool is you’re just one click away from delegating it. Right. So, you know, hey, hey, Dario, I want to talk about redesigning the website. Great.

So there’s a line item. I want to talk about redesigning the website now, whatever we agree to, like change the color to blue. I just have to, you know, we make a comment, we put a due date on it, add it to the add it to the project, but it’s already a task inside of your project management software. So you’re just already one click closer to having this thing done. Another thing that you can do with your meetings is think about, think about time in a slightly different way.

So a lot of what we’ve discussed for the first 45 minutes are strategies on how to save time. But it’s also important to be thinking about how do you optimize time. Not every time slot on your calendar is worth the same. So it could be that you’re a morning person and 9am on a Monday, after you’ve had a relaxing weekend, and you woke up and meditated and worked out and had your kombucha or whatever you do in the mornings. It could be that 9am on a Monday could be worth $ 1, 000 an hour to you versus.

7 o’clock on a Friday after you’ve had 100 Zoom calls and now you’re in the back of an Uber with no Wi- Fi and no laptop, that time slot might be worth $ 25 to you. So not every time slot is worth the same. If you can free up time at whatever the high value, you might be a night person, it might be the complete opposite, it doesn’t matter. You should know and be able to predict what are the high value time slots for you. And you should be trying as much as possible to free up those times for things that actually require your brain at high horsepower.

So an hour meeting that you could reduce to 45 or 30 minutes by some of these strategies might be worth significant amounts to you over time because now you’re freeing up that time to do the hard problems that require that fresh brain. Oftentimes too, what’s happening inside of these meetings are things that could have been done asynchronously. There’s tools like Loom where you could pre- record yourself talking about something.

And now you do a time shift, you shorten the meeting by 15 minutes because people discuss things that were the report outs, you know, hey, I want to talk about the results of this and there’s like a 10 slide deck that they want to talk through, cool. Pre- record it, send it to me. And now when I’m in the back of an Uber, I have something to watch and I’ve just freed up all that live time. And now when we join that meeting, I’ve already watched the pre- reads and now we can be way more efficient and get everything done in 45 minutes live.

So this is what it looks like inside of Asana for my company. We’ve got a agenda project when we do our kind of leadership call. We always kind of cover these topics. I’m always asking people every week, what process improvements and utilization of AI did you use? What learnings and changes are we going to do to our training programs? What did we test? Who’s working on what? Before we start the ad hoc stuff, we always ask this every week.

And then we’ve got an ad hoc section that is where people add things to limit the distraction and the communication tools. And then we batch go through it live on a call.

Okay.

Lastly, you have resources. That’s that third part of CPR. This is all your knowledge, your SOPs, your processes. We use Codit, Leverage, there’s Notion, there’s SharePoint, there’s a whole bunch. But it’s important that you have a digital wiki. You know, the old school way was a physical employee handbook that you’d give to people. But the obvious issue with that is, if you need to make an update to it, you’re going to got to print out 200 pages and pass it off to all your employees.

Now there’s wonderful digital tools that are cloud based, and very visual and easy to navigate. And now if you need to look up, you know, hey, when do I move a deal from stage two to three of our pipeline? That’s documented. And in two clicks, you can find that in the wiki. Not to mention, if you ever try to exit your company, the more turnkey that you can make your company, the higher the multiplier you’re going to get on the exit. Okay, so at Leverage, we have a playbook.

So people if they want to find our goals, how we communicate the vision, easy to navigate, very visual. You can even start doing low code, no code kind of little mini apps. So we’ve documented all of our core responsibilities per person. If someone doesn’t like doing an activity, they could click an offload button. And now on our quarterly one on ones, we can go through everything that people want to offload. And hope me, hopefully we can get some off their plate.

I have an EA. So I’ve documented in my EA document, everything that you need to know about me. So they can go and find stuff about my health, they could find stuff about how I like to travel or whatever, they can log errors so we can learn from it. And then if my EA quits, and I need another EA, I have this asset, it’s 10 times, maybe even 1000 times faster to get someone up to speed, because I just give them a link to this and I say read this before you get started. And then we’ll discuss.

So the benefits of documentation, clearly, there’s some time savings you if, if someone can go and self serve an answer that’s going to also limit the number of slack messages that you’re getting. But also not just waste your time, but people are going to get a more accurate, faster response than having to wait for you to respond. It’s going to reduce risk. You don’t want to ever not fire someone because you’re scared that if you fire them, they’re going to leave with all this knowledge and it’s going to be a huge negative impact.

You don’t want to be managing from a from a position of vulnerability. So it’s going to help you to reduce the risk of someone leaving but also reduce the risk of an error happening in the moment. I think it was a book called The Checklist Manifesto written by a surgeon. And when they put checklists inside of surgical rooms, the rate of error of a surgery went down by like some staggering amount like 30% or something.

Also, it’s going to spark new ideas. I mentioned earlier, in my former life, I was a high- frequency trader. And so in that space, I was building algorithms and I was coding computers to trade stocks at literally microsecond speeds. And in that space, they forced us to do what’s called a block leave. So every year, I had to take two weeks off and I was completely shut out from systems. No phone, no access to the email, couldn’t come into the office, completely shut out. And they do that to stress test systems.

But really, frankly, it’s to make sure you’re not doing anything shady. And even though I was the expert at the algorithms I was building, it forced me to document what I was doing, train someone else how to run my book. And every year for eight years, when I would come back from vacation, there was always some improvement to how my book traded. And that’s because it’s hard to see the label when you’re inside the jar. You want to be able to spark new ideas inside of your company. You want to challenge the status quo.

I absolutely hate when I hear from someone that they’re continuing to do something in a certain way because it’s the way that they’ve always done something. So documenting process helps you move away from that. Now, I know I’ve just firehose you with a lot of concepts and tools.

It might seem hard, but if you’re right now operating your company off of text and email, you might be thinking to yourself, hey, all these tools like Coda, like Asana, all these tools, isn’t it less efficient to have to navigate 20 different tools and just use one or two tools? For sure, you don’t want to have 100 tools that you’re managing. But at the same time, if you’re spending a significant percentage of your week doing, you know, delegating or doing tasks or projects, it behooves you to, what is this, got a little pop up.

It behooves you to not use a best in class tool. So you could chop down a tree with a Swiss Army knife where text and email and Slack right now, you’re using it like a Swiss Army knife. But if you’ve got to chop down a tree once a week or every day, you’re better off using a chainsaw. Okay, so these different tools within CP& R, you want to use a chainsaw because they’re so fundamental and critical to the productivity of your team. Graham, you have a question?

Sure. Yeah.

Thank you so much for the for the talk today. Doing a lot and over the last couple years, sorry, Graham from Fable, I work as the head of operations. We’re about six years in. And over the last two years or so, we’ve really invested in asynchronous communication and documentation. Part of this was I went on six week parental leave and was doing a lot of things in my head and had to write them all down.

So my question is beyond kind of the the points that you put on the last slide, do you have any indicators like KPIs or suggestions of things that we can actually track to see that this is working? We track things at a high level like ARR per employee, but it’s a bit of a lagging indicator. And I’m curious if you can point to any other metrics that we can look to kind of to be more proactive to see if this is working?

Well, not to give you an additional tool, right. But do you use anything like 15. 5 or Lattice or CultureAmp or any of those types of employee engagement platforms?

Good question. No, we don’t. We do our own employee engagement surveys and that sort of thing. And we do pulse checks weekly as well. But no, we don’t use external tools.

So, you know, I don’t know what you’re asking the pulse checks, but. You know, if you start asking, like, what percentage of time do you think you spend on things that give you joy or tap and, you know, add value to the company, that could be the type of metric that you might want to start looking at and add it to to a feedback form.

Got it. I guess the challenge is that those things are so subjective. We’re looking for kind of more like cold hard evidence that this is working rather than how are people feeling this is working?

Well, well, the quick you could do this, the feedback very quickly. That’s that’s a that doesn’t cost you anything. The other thing that you could start doing is I don’t know how you start doing how you do sprint planning at your company, but at leverage, we expect people to work 50 hours a week because it’s remote. They don’t have any commute. So someone’s capacity for doing new work.

we track it in Asana. So every week when they do their sprint, it’s like, what are you gonna work on this week? So the stuff that they can work on is 50, their total capacity, minus how many hours they’re spending in meetings for that week, minus a buffer that they’ve put for inbox zero, which inbox zero to me is not just email, it’s systems hygiene, Slack, et cetera, right? And when you subtract all of that, how much time do they have left?

So you could start doing that with your team and you could see, because ultimately what you want is their capacity for the new work each week sprint, you want that to be maximum, right? So start with the pulse survey questions, but then you probably wanna start looking at people’s capacity and then you could start tracking their capacity. Great, thanks Nick. No problem, all right.

All right, look, we’re in the homestretch here and we’ll open up to questions, but just like money is an asset, time’s an asset, time is the most valuable asset that you have. You can go bankrupt tomorrow and make back your money, but if you waste time, you’re never gonna get that back, okay?

And a lot of this stuff that we’re talking about here takes a back burner in priorities and when you’re kind of laying out what are the key objectives for the quarter or for the year, oftentimes you’re really focused on things that are revenue generating immediately, like how do we increase sales? What are we gonna do for marketing, get more leads that’s gonna impact the top line?

All that stuff is important, but if you’re 100% thinking about top line all the time and you put no attention into your operational efficiency, it’s gonna end up costing you much, much, much, much more long- term. So I don’t think it needs to be 100% zero, but maybe it’s 80, 20, it depends on where you’re at as a business, but on the right, that’s my handyman Marvin and it’s kind of like, imagine you have this broken pipe.

I could have just wiped, I could have just mopped the floor and it takes me five minutes to clean up the water and I could have moved on with my day when the pipe broke. But investing the time to maybe spend an hour to fix the pipe, if every day I had to wipe the floor for five minutes, after 12 days I’ve broken even on that investment, right?

Oftentimes we don’t take a step back and invest that hour to fix something because we’re so busy closing that next deal and I’m not telling you not to close that next deal, but sometimes investing a couple hours to fix something on a fundamental foundational level, you’re gonna start seeing that you now have an extra 10 hours or 10 minutes a week for the rest of your life. And maybe you have hundreds of opportunities to save five or 10 minutes a week. And the tricky thing is that you don’t see that feedback loop like you were saying, right?

When you change your Facebook ads, you’re gonna see more leads, you’re gonna see more revenue. With this stuff, they’re like micro improvements that when you stack a bunch together you feel, but in the moment, you’re not gonna see it hit your QuickBooks or bank account, but it’s there and it’s a massive, massive impact to your bottom line, okay? So a lot of this stuff is in, if you wanna learn more about this stuff, I would encourage you to check out my book.

If you need more help, you can reach out and we have training programs on all this stuff if you feel like this is an area that you need to invest in. There’s a lot of bonus resources to the book, totally free that you can get at comeupforair. com if you wanna check those out. My book is 300 pages long and there’s no fluff and HarperCollins didn’t want me going any longer and I’m a productivity geek, so you can imagine most people this would have been like a 1400 page book.

So throughout the book, I reference comeupforair. com for additional PDFs and tips and tricks and playbooks that you can check out. And look, this stuff isn’t easy, but picture a day where work is easier and you have a team that’s super happy and everything’s getting done and you just don’t have, you could go on vacation and things are just getting done and you don’t have to stress about anything and you don’t have to think about hiring more and more and more people.

You can take your foot off of that and just trust that you’ve got the right team fully utilized. So here’s my personal contact if you wanna reach out and I think we got a little bit of time right now to do some Q& A. Nick, we’re actually at time.

Thank you everyone for joining, but we’ll send a recap email out so you get the slides, the recording, as well as a way to contact Nick with any additional questions. Thanks, Nick.