Stop Doing These Tasks
The Amplified Impact Podcast
October 30th, 2023
Here’s a simple way to turbocharge your productivity.
Think of your tasks as $10 tasks or $1,000 tasks.
$10 tasks are things you could pay someone $10 an hour to do, like laundry or dishes.
$1,000 tasks are high-value, unique to you, like content creation.
Now, consider your aspirational hourly rate.
Focus on tasks that match that value. It’s a game-changer for your to-do list.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“The way to think about this, I think, is really valuable in the sense that it gives you a lens through which to look at what you’re trying to accomplish.”
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
So here’s a super simple reframe for how you can tackle the tasks that you have on your endless to do list. I like to think of, like, the to do list as just another metaphor for the hydra, which is you cut off that one head, another two pop up to take its place. It’s this albatross, this thing that you just can’t get rid of. And so the harder you try with your to do list, the I think the more frustrated you’re gonna become. Maybe you get busy, but you’re not necessarily effective. And to be effective, I think you need to have a good priority management system, which is a way of identifying what are the most important things that you should be spending your time on. And we know this intuitively, but in practice, applying it on a consistent basis, that’s the real struggle. So I want to provide you with some tools, some ways of thinking about this that might serve you in different scenarios.
Anthony Vicino:
This is one that I read about a number of years ago. I cannot even remember the name of the guy, but it was this really small book. It was more like a pamphlet, really not worth reading in the grand scheme of things. There’s some cool ideas in there, but not worth picking up, so I’m not going to go grab it and figure out who wrote this thing. But there was one idea in there, and I think I maybe had heard it somewhere else before, but when I was reading it here, it kind of stuck with me as, like, a valuable idea. The way he framed it was you as a founder, as a business owner, you need to be spending your time on the $1,000 tasks, not the $10 tasks. I heard this recently from somebody else who said that you cannot build a $10 million company doing $10 an hour tasks. Actually, that was Dan Martel who said that he’s got some really great content.
Anthony Vicino:
Highly recommend you guys check him out. So what’s that mean? What does it mean to have $10 task for $1,000 task? A $10 task is something that you could pay somebody $10 an hour to do. You could pay somebody $10 an hour to, I don’t know, maybe not these days with inflation, but let’s say $20 an hour, you could pay somebody to come in and clean your apartment, to do your laundry, to do your dishes. You could pay somebody to do those things. They’re not value additive to your life. You doing them does not add more to your bank account. It can be outsourced. And so the way to think about this is if you have an aspirational hourly rate of, say, $1,000, like, if you say that’s what my time is worth is $1,000, I need to be working on things that only bring in or have the potential to bring in $1,000.
Anthony Vicino:
Then you start to look at your to do list very differently, and you start to categorize rise things as, okay, if I could outsource this for less than $1,000, I would be better spent hiring somebody to do this thing for me rather than doing it because, say, it costs $500 for me to hire this thing out. That means I could hire it out for 500. I could spend that hour doing my $1,000 task, and I would still be coming out $500 positive while also having gotten the other thing. So that’s a way of thinking about this. Now, in practice, I don’t know what your aspirational rate is. Maybe it’s $100, maybe it’s 200. When I was first starting out, it was much lower than it is now. It starts to grow and expand over time as the things that you could be working on become more and more potentially valuable.
Anthony Vicino:
But the way to think about this, I think, is really valuable in the sense that it gives you a lens through which to look at what you’re trying to accomplish. And when you’re spending time on things over and over and over that are considered $10, $15 an hour tasks, then I want that to be the thing that grabs your attention, for you to realize, wait, why am I doing this? Am I doing this because I’m just in a routine? Is it out of some kind of obligation? Is because I haven’t decided that this is a big enough problem for me to solve with money? Because as my mentor once said, if you have a problem that can be solved by money, you don’t really have a problem. And I would encourage you to think about your money as a tool for buying back your time. That’s the name of Dan Martel’s book. I actually haven’t read it yet, but it is sitting right here on the floor. Excited to dig into it because I’m sure there’s a lot of great concepts in there. But you should be using your money to buy back your time so that you can spend that time how you want to or on the higher value tasks that only you could do. And so for me, an example of, say, $1,000 an hour task would be writing, because only I can write what I have in my head, maybe doing this podcast, I can’t hire somebody to do this podcast for me.
Anthony Vicino:
However, on the back end of this, once I’m done recording, it’s not a good use of my time to do the editing, to do the distribution or any of that stuff. So the content creation is my $1,000 an hour task, what I’m doing right now. But then everything else on the backside, somebody else should be doing that. And in the beginning, full disclosure, three years ago when I started my very first podcast, which is Multifamily Investing Made Simple, for the first 50 episodes, I did everything. I did the content, I was the talent, I did the editing, I did the distribution. I did it all because I wanted to understand how to do it and what a good result was so that I could outsource it, I could delegate it and hold somebody accountable to an outcome. When we delegate things a little bit too early, sometimes we don’t know what a good outcome looks like, and so we’re at the mercy of that person and the information that they give us as the expert. And so we’re kind of forced to take their judgment at face value, and that’s not always a good thing.
Anthony Vicino:
So I do recommend not outsourcing things until you have done them yourself so you understand what goes into it. Once you’ve done that. You don’t need to be doing your dishes or your cooking or your laundry. These are examples for me. Those are things that I hate doing. I don’t get fulfillment out of them. If you do, then do them. If that’s like your meditative practice, you love cooking, by all means, go for it.
Anthony Vicino:
But if you don’t and it’s distracting you or pulling you away from your work and building your business, then give really serious thought to outsourcing that. Now, as a founder, as an entrepreneur, CEO, one of the very first things, one of the very first hires you should make is an executive assistant, somebody who can take the admin stuff off of your plate. The emails, the schedule, management, all that stuff ends up being things that need to get done to lubricate the machine that is your life. However, it is not the most important part of the machine, and it is ultimately you in the driver’s seat driving the machine to the destination. That’s the important part. Not you changing the oil of the machine. So I just wanted to share that with you guys because it’s a cool framework that I found some value in, and hopefully it kind of gives you a new lens through which to view your priority management. If that did resonate, then do me a favor, drop a review.
Anthony Vicino:
Drop a, like, drop subscribe. Drop like it’s hot. Drop like a thing that you don’t want to hold on to anymore. So that’s going to do it for me. Guys and gals, I appreciate you being here. Catch you in the next episode. Peace.
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