How to take control of your time, and trade stress, overwhelm and anxiety for peace, freedom and clarity, with Andrew Hartman.

Andrew shares time management and productivity improvement tips and techniques for small business owners.  He also introduces his time operating system designed to multiply your time.

Andrew Hartman is the Founder of Time Boss, a training organization helping leaders and their teams take control of their time to get more done with less stress and anxiety.

Andrew founded Time Boss after burning out several times over, even losing his sense of smell for a season. He has taken all he has learned over the years to build a system to help business leaders avoid the same mistakes and chaos.

Andrew lives in Orange County, California

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• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

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Transcript:

The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.

Henry Lopez (00:16):

Welcome to this episode of The How of Business. This is Henry Lopez and my guest today is Andrew Hartman. Andrew, welcome to the show. Hey Henry, thanks so much for having me. Glad to be here. Thanks. And this is an episode where we’re going to focus on time management and productivity improvements for us as small business owners. Andrew Hartman is with me today and he’s going to share his time operating system, as he calls it, that he’s designed, that can help you multiply your time. He helps people trade stress, overwhelm and anxiety for peace, freedom and clarity, which is a great thing to try to achieve. So that’s what we’re going to focus on this episode to get all of the hallow business resources, including the show dose page for this episode. And to learn more about my coaching programs, please visit the how of business.com. I also invite you to please consider supporting this podcast on Patreon, and please subscribe wherever you might be listening so you don’t miss any in new episodes.

Henry Lopez (01:19):

Lemme tell you just a little bit more about Andrew and then we’ll get into it. Andrew Hartman is the founder of Time Boss. Time Boss is a training organization helping leaders and their teams take control of their time to get more done with less stress and anxiety. Andrew founded Time Boss after burning out several times. We’ll explore that a little bit, even losing his sense of smell for a season. And he has taken all, he has learned over the years to build a system to help business leaders avoid the same mistakes and chaos. Andrew losing the Orange County, California area. So once again, Andrew Hartman, welcome to the show.

Andrew Hartman (01:59):

Awesome, thanks so much Henry. Glad to be here.

Henry Lopez (02:01):

Certainly. Well, let’s start at the obvious there. As I alluded to in the opening, I’m sure you’ve told this story a million times, but if you would share it with us again, what were some of those things that happened to you that led you to focus on helping others manage their time?

Andrew Hartman (02:15):

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I have to imagine your audience listening will resonate. I have worked in small businesses and early stage companies my whole career, so a lot of this came from those environments.

Henry Lopez (02:29):

They’re very high growth. How fast-paced environments,

Andrew Hartman (02:32):

Yes, high growth, short runways, big expectations, way more to do than we have time to do it. I’m sure. I imagine if people listening their palms are getting sweaty, as I say, things like that, I think we’ve all been there, which is challenging. So I was there, it was late twenties and I had a great family, great education, and ended up in a role where I had so much more to do than I had time to do it, and I was almost instantly overwhelmed. I tried to navigate the best I could. I had a to-do list, a calendar, a Franklin Covey planner. I had all the things that people told me to have. But what I realized is, wow, I have no mental models or philosophy for how to actually make these things happen without just being feeling so stressed all the time. So that led to working all the time or sleep, waking up in the middle of the night trying to remember details, writing ’em down on post-it notes next to my bed, waking up the next morning looking at those post-it notes and they were illegible, impossible to read.

Andrew Hartman (03:36):

So it was just a nightmare. And that season went on long enough where I ultimately did lose my sense of smell. Like I mentioned, I could feel it coming. I knew I’d have hot flashes, I’d have stress has really wacky impacts on the body. Some people will get headaches, tension, headaches, back issues, irritable bowel syndrome. It’s really your body’s flashing lights on the dashboard saying something needs to change. This is not sustainable. We cannot operate this way. And that ultimately led to a pretty big burnout for me that was so challenging. I did eventually recover. My sense of smell took a while, took six months like I said, but it didn’t totally solve the challenges that I had related to time. I moved on in roles, I grew in leadership. The sad part about all this, and I imagine a lot of the people listening to this podcast are in similar spots.

Andrew Hartman (04:36):

You get rewarded for making things happen. And so if you’re getting rewarded, it’s really hard to change because you’re getting results and people are like, yeah, keep going, or you’re making rent or whatever you’re doing to get your business off the ground. You are afraid to make change because you don’t know what else to do and you don’t know how to get the results that you want without anxiety and stress and burnout as the tax of that. So I kept going, started having individuals on my team in these early stage software environments that were burned out as well. And eventually I said, I just can’t live this way. It was impacting my family, it was impacting my kids. And so really I took a first principal’s approach to it and said, okay, I have to constrain the amount of time that I’m working and I have to constrain the amount of stress that I’m feeling.

Andrew Hartman (05:27):

If those two things become my boundary conditions, I’m going to operate with peace, freedom, and clarity, and I’m only going to work so many hours a week because I got to get my life back. I just began to build a framework that was going to work for me. And once I built it for myself, I leveraged it with my teams. They started experiencing phenomenal results without stress, anxiety, and burnout. I’d move on to other companies, I’d install that same framework. They’d been involved into other companies. They’d asked me to come help them install the framework. And it just organically built to this thing where I realized, wow, this is beyond just me. We are tapping into something that’s just the way time works. And that’s what led us to the time Boss framework that we train individuals and teams on now.

Henry Lopez (06:12):

Right. A couple questions there. When you started to set those boundaries for how many hours you worked particular, did you get pushback from your superiors? Did it affect your

Andrew Hartman (06:23):

Career? It took some work for sure. I could not make a hard boundary. The key there is really this, that the fascinating thing about making time a boundary as it forces you to very judiciously look at the things that are on your calendar to begin with. And so often when people struggle with their relationship with time, they are saying yes to so much nonsense that has no business being on their calendar, but because they’re not constraining their time, they’re willing to tolerate it. So I would allow myself to get interrupted constantly. People were constantly coming for my time, so I wasn’t even working my priorities. I was working other people’s priorities most of the time.

Henry Lopez (07:02):

And which your bosses want is results. And so as long as you are still delivering results, then that’s what allowed you to do it a different

Andrew Hartman (07:10):

Way. You are exactly right. So with the teams I was working with or partners or investors, whoever I just got really clear is let’s align on outcomes. What are the outcomes that matter? And I am going to build a different system that’s going to deliver those same exact outcomes, but do so in a way where I can be home for dinner and do so in a way where I’m not experiencing stress, anxiety, fear in my off hours that are taking me away from my family or taking me away from my kids. And so again, it was a first principles approach. It was how can I continue to deliver results with without this dominating my life and without stress, fear, and anxiety being the tax on whatever results I’m getting.

Henry Lopez (07:52):

And then of course we will talk about it in a moment, but when we move into the realm of our own business, then I think what happens is that’s the only way we know how to do it, is just to do more work, more hours, put in more effort. Right? That’s just a natural thing. But before we get into that, what’s your age range? If you don’t mind sharing? How old

Andrew Hartman (08:15):

Are you? No problem. I’m in my mid forties. I’m 44. Okay.

Henry Lopez (08:17):

Okay. Alright. So in that next generation below me, do you think, I don’t know if this is me being an old man or if there’s really something to, it seems like work environments, life in general seems to be more stressful now than it was when I was starting my career. As you work with people, that’s just me thinking as an old guy or do you see a difference in what work environments are like now? Are they more stressful or am I just not remembering the stress?

Andrew Hartman (08:49):

So I think there’s more stress being experienced. I don’t know that they’re more stressful, but I know that there’s more stress being experienced.

Henry Lopez (08:57):

Why is it being, yeah, why

Andrew Hartman (08:59):

Is that? Yeah, I was going to say I have some theories about that one. No problem at all. No problem at all. One is I think our tools have advanced to where we are constantly available all the time. So formally, and it certainly wasn’t always this way, but even early in my career, I had a computer that lived at the office. I didn’t have a laptop, and so at five or 6:00 PM when I went home, there was nothing I could do anyways. My job ended, it had a

Henry Lopez (09:29):

Start and I didn’t know about it. I remember coming into the office and getting the little pink slips with a note of a message, right? So I couldn’t stress about that at home because I didn’t know about it. Right.

Andrew Hartman (09:41):

You’re exactly right.

Henry Lopez (09:42):

Yeah. So that technology now, those inputs have been exacerbated and they’re hitting us immediately,

Andrew Hartman (09:50):

Right? Yeah. You think about a letter in a mailbox, that letter in the mailbox does not exist in my mental context until I open up the mailbox and I see the letter and now that context exists and I can take action on it. When we have notifications that are constantly on, if every time a new email comes in, we are booting up that context, stealing us from whatever moment we’re in. So if I’m putting my kids to bed at night and I get an email from my partner or from that big client or that VIP that I really care about, that’s the context that’s living in my brain now. I have no way to shut that off. And so again, I think that the parameters of work are still there, the expectations of work are still there. So there’s inherent stress obviously in work, but I think it’s the experienced stress has increased because of the impact that technology has on us for certain.

Henry Lopez (10:47):

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

Andrew Hartman (10:49):

The remote environment doesn’t help either. Post Covid I think has had a dramatic impact on individuals. They don’t have ways to separate work and home meaningfully.

Henry Lopez (10:57):

I see. It gets blurred.

Andrew Hartman (10:58):

Yeah, it’s very blurred and it’s very arbitrary. And so even the concept of time Boss, that language Henry, comes from the idea of we have to become the boss of our future self. We have to think of our future self like an employee that we’re planning for, where we’re really looking to see how can we set up that individual to be successful. What most people do instead is they simply show up in their day, they kind of punt to their future self to figure it out, and they’re constantly dealing with trade-offs and their work and their home life is blurred and there’s way more things to do than they have time to do it. So the average experience of the current knowledge worker, someone whose values between their ears is overwhelm, their average experience is overwhelm. If they don’t have different mental models to think about all the things that are coming at them.

Henry Lopez (11:47):

If I argue to that, well, to get ahead of my career or to build this business, that’s what I have to do. That’s the way it’s done. What do you say to that?

Andrew Hartman (11:56):

So I’m with you, I’m aligned. So the way that I would say is this, if you think about anything you’ve achieved in your life looking backwards, if we look at arrears, it was a discreet series of steps, one after another that led you to the outcomes that you’ve achieved. And so if that’s true looking backwards, then that’s obviously true moving forwards that there’s a discrete series of steps between here and whatever outcome that I want. So what I encourage people to get really clear on is if you are really clear on the outcome, the next prudent thing is to decide your constraints. And we do this all the time. We all, if we’re prudent, have some type of budget that’s controlling our financial situation. And all a budget is constraints to drive decision making. I am only going to spend $5,000 a month on rent or whatever the number is for whatever the category is.

Andrew Hartman (12:49):

We create constraints because when we do that, we know that we are going to maintain our financial health. Our time in my opinion is just no different. And so if you think about that and you say, for me, I have decided for myself, I’m building a business, I’ve previously owned franchises where I did the same, I’ve decided that I’m going to spend 50 hours a week on income generating activities. That is my boundary. I know if I go far beyond that, it’s diminishing returns. I know that I’m stressing myself out. I’m not doing great work. It’s impacting my family and my kids and I’m just not going to tolerate that. So if that’s my budget, again using financial terms, if that is my currency, it forces me to think creatively about how do I prioritize high leverage tasks that are going to allow me to deliver on the outcomes that I want or I’m responsible for within that constraint just like a financial budget. So again, in the same way, it would be not prudent to simply run up a credit card debt unending in the spirit of advancing your business. I think our time is the exact same, and by leaning into those constraints, it forces creativity for us to find higher leverage activities that are going to fit within that time budget to get the results that we want.

Henry Lopez (14:02):

Brilliant. I think that’s brilliant. I think that to continue on that analogy, I always find that businesses that might have relatively unlimited capital often will make bad decisions because they’re not constrained, right? It’s like, no, let’s try that, let’s try this. But when I really have to think about how I’m going to spend that very specific marketing budget, let’s say, I typically end up making better decisions, more informed decisions on how to do so.

Andrew Hartman (14:29):

That is a brilliant analogy. Henry, I’ve studied, so I’ve worked in early stage software startups, I’ve studied early stage software startups and that analogy is often used that it even within large corporations, often they will isolate a team with a fixed budget in order to drive focused results. Because to your point, endless resources lead to endless so many things I could, there’s so many things I could consider, and we as humans are fundamentally terrible at it. Infinity, we do really well with constraints. It helps us focus. If you show up on a webpage and there’s a million options, it’s highly likely you’ll choose none of them. If you show up on a webpage and there’s three options, it’s highly likely you’ll choose the middle one. And it’s just the science of how our brains work. And so time is no different. We just need to create, again, that idea of setting up our future self to be successful, being the time boss of our future self, we have to create a framework for that individual to show up on Monday morning at 8:00 AM and just make great work happen. But it takes a little bit of prep to make that happen.

Henry Lopez (15:31):

Yeah. So I’m assuming that then in part that’s where the Time Boss framework comes into play. Would you introduce what this is about the Time Boss framework?

Andrew Hartman (15:40):

Yeah, absolutely. So the Time Boss Framework is all about how do I align the next seven days to my goals, values, and priorities. So often many of us have big goals we’re trying to achieve. Maybe we’re running some type of business operating system like EOS or Scaling Up or Pinnacle or something like that, or we’re just setting quarterly goals for our businesses. The way that we achieve our quarterly goals is being effective over the next seven days, over and over and over and over again. And that is really the thing that we have agency over and the thing that we can control. And so the Time Boss framework is all about, again, being the boss of your future self, creating a really high quality plan over the next seven days where you can be as effective as possible, get the results you want, again, without stress and anxiety, burnout being the tax on getting those results.

Andrew Hartman (16:34):

So it really comes down to two habits. It’s very simple, incredibly simple in practice. And as with anything, it is hard to change our habits, but simple to explain. One is a weekly planning meeting. And in that weekly planning meeting, I typically recommend people do it on a Friday afternoon or a Saturday morning whenever they have kind of emotional freedom to make a plan happen. Really what you’re doing is you are creating a plan for your future self to be successful. And it involves really six simple steps and I’m happy to walk through ’em, Henry, or if you want to, this is a meeting with myself,

Andrew Hartman (17:05):

Right? Correct. Just with you, but really good point, or I’m glad you clarified on that, Henry, you need to treat this meeting. The president of the United States is showing up there to meet with you. This must be sacred. This should be the most valuable thing you do all week long to set your future self up to be successful. So I never miss, I’ve built accountability systems into my world to ensure that I never miss this weekly planning meeting. So, so valuable to me. So six steps. One is reflection. So strongly encourage people. Again, if you’re making this a weekly habit, you’re doing this every single week, reflect on your experience of that previous week, James Clear in Atomic Habits, a book that I love talks about one degree course corrections. And he says, if you make that slight course correction day over day or week over week, those begin to build on each other and over time it has an exponential impact.

Andrew Hartman (17:59):

So beginning a weekly planning meeting with reflection is so powerful. It allows you to make those tiny adjustments again to make yourself more and more effective week over week over week at whatever you’re trying to achieve. The next thing that I recommend to people to do is to get everything out of their head and into the system. If you’ve ever read books like Getting Things Done or other systems like that, the primary thing they say is that you cannot hold all the details in your head. So you need to get it out of your head and into a system. That can be a paper list, that can be a free to-Do manager like Asana or reminders on your iPhone or on your Android phone. There’s a lot of ways you can do this, but just get it out of your head into a single system that you can work with.

Andrew Hartman (18:42):

So once it’s out of your head, the next step is to really to prioritize. The reality is if you think about your future self at 8:00 AM on Monday, if that’s when you begin work or whenever you choose to start work, you can only do one thing at a time reasonably. You may feel like you can multitask, but the reality is you are just exhausting your brain. And so my strong encouragement to you, and we’ll talk about this a little bit later, how you do this is to just pick the thing. What is the number one thing on your list that you need to make happen? And then what’s the number two thing and what’s the number three thing? But get that list prioritized where you’re really considering what are the things that I have to do? What are the things that are going to help me that move the needle on the goals that I’m responsible for or that I’m committed to, I’m trying to achieve?

Andrew Hartman (19:23):

Simply prioritize that list. The reason why it’s so powerful to do that in a weekly planning meeting is that allows you to deal with the trade-offs in this kind of safe, secure environment. What we often do instead is we punt to our future self to figure that out real time over and over and over and over again and we’re just taxing our brain. We’re literally adding stress to our day that doesn’t need to be there. So by localizing that prioritization process to this weekly planning meeting, again, you’re going to do it again next week. You’re not committing to this forever. It’s a very dynamic process, but at least for the next seven days, what are the priorities? Once that’s prioritized, what I encourage people to do is to take those priorities and break them down into one to four hour tasks. The reason why I recommend that is this. Our brain loves to take action and see the results. This is why we love our email inboxes. We love seeing the unread count on our email inbox go down. It’s probably the greatest video game of all time is our email on red count. And the reason we love that is because we are taking action and we’re seeing a result. The sad part is us spending a ton of time in email, depending on your job, is not often indicative of you actually being successful. It’s simply indicative that you can clear out your email inbox,

Henry Lopez (20:37):

Not to mention that it speaks to you. Where we started a conversation with that constant, now you’re distracting yourself.

Andrew Hartman (20:42):

Absolutely. You’re exactly right, Henry, every email you look, it’s like walking a different room with a whole new set of context. So it just distracts you. So what we want to do is leverage that same science of the brain where the brain loves to take action and see results. The brain loves knowing that you’re making progress. Imagine running a marathon with no mile markers, two hours into that marathon, you’d be like, what are we doing? I don’t know if I’m halfway done. I don’t know if I’m two thirds of the way done. I dunno, I’m a third of the way done. The reason why the mile markers are there in a marathon is because they give us context for our pace. They help us understand that we’re actually making progress, and so we need to manufacture that same type of thing for our future self. So that’s why I recommend, again, these one to four hour tasks, these become progress check marks on larger projects that help us understand that we’re making progress. This is

Henry Lopez (21:32):

Do I time block those out on my schedule as much as possible for next week?

Andrew Hartman (21:36):

Yes sir. That’s the next step. That is the next step. So especially for small business owners, again, we bought multiple franchises, we started them from ground zero. If you’re it, if you’re a solopreneur, if you’re the only one doing it, you’re literally managing your future self like a project manager. You don’t have the luxury that bigger companies have of having dedicated project managers that help break this down for us. We have to do this work and it’s, it’s not as hard as it sounds. I want to speak hope to people listening. Imagine if the number one thing on my list is I need to hire a sales director. That’s a big amorphous task. There’s a lot of parts to that. If I just hire a sales director at 8:00 AM on Monday on my calendar, there’s no way I’m going to make meaningful progress on that or I might make some progress, but I’ll probably get distracted because it’s just,

Henry Lopez (22:21):

And you’re going to put it off because it’s this big thing

Andrew Hartman (22:24):

That

Henry Lopez (22:24):

Requires all these steps

Andrew Hartman (22:26):

And your email inbox notification is going to go off and you’ll be like, you know what? I know how to answer email, I’m just going to go do that. But instead, if you make it manageable, you break it down one to four hour task, you might say, I’m going to spend an hour writing a job description and then I’m going to spend an hour getting feedback from three trusted advisors on that job description. Then I’m going to spend two hours posting it on LinkedIn indeed and sharing it with my network, asking for personal referrals. You’ll see what I’m doing. We’re converting it into mile markers on the marathon, manageable chunks that you can take at 8:00 AM on Monday and know that you’re making progress. So again, we’re breaking those down to one to four hour. I recommend one to four hour. Anything less than one gets hard to manage, especially as we are about to move this to your calendar. We are typically pretty bad at estimating anything larger than half a day. It’s just hard for our brain to do it. So I’d

Henry Lopez (23:15):

Commend for me just to expand upon this. I’d like one hour blocks because if I’m truly concentrating, because at about an hour I start to lose my attention, so I start to my a DD kicks in.

Andrew Hartman (23:30):

Yep, that’s

Henry Lopez (23:32):

Great. I think we all have to adjust it for where our attention span is as well. Right now, there are some things that I need four hours of an interrupted time, and that’s what you’re talking about here. I will determine, okay, that job description is going to take me an hour or

Andrew Hartman (23:46):

Correct.

Henry Lopez (23:46):

This other step is going to take me two hours of concentrated time. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Andrew Hartman (23:51):

That’s exactly right. And you think about it, if you think about in the sequential order we went in, our first step was getting those things in priority order, those outcomes. So number one for me was hire sales director.

Speaker 1 (24:01):

So

Andrew Hartman (24:02):

That means that all the subsequent those broken down steps are still my top priority of that top task, which means those are the first things that need to get to my calendar.

Andrew Hartman (24:14):

So then in the next step, this one has a couple moving parts to it. The first thing I recommend to people is just decide how much of your life you want to give to this area and it’s up to you. This might be a side hustle, you might be a solopreneur side hustle and you only have 10 hours a week because you’re working a full-time job or maybe two jobs already. Okay, so it’s 10 hours. This may be your whole world and you may not have any stakeholders in your life that are asking for time and you may say, I’m going to give 80 hours or a hundred hours this week to the thing I’m working on. Ultimately, it’s your choice. I pass no judgment on the amount of time you choose to work. What I care about is that you can deliver on the outcomes that you feel committed to, responsible for the contribution you want to make and that you can do so without stress, fear, and anxiety being the tax on those results. And so if you can do that in 80 hours, go for it. For me, 50 is my max. If I go beyond 50, I’m not healthy. I’m not in a good spot. That is my highest sustainable pace.

Henry Lopez (25:13):

This is Enri Lopez, briefly pausing this episode to invite you to schedule a free coaching consultation with me. I welcome the opportunity to chat with you about your business plans and offer the guidance and accountability that we all need to achieve success. As an experienced small business owner myself, I understand the challenges you’re experiencing and often it’s about helping you ask the right questions to help you make progress towards achieving your goals. Whether it’s getting started with your first business or growing and maybe exiting your existing small business, I can help you get there. To find out more about my business coaching services and to schedule your free coaching consultation, please visit the how of business.com. Take that next step today towards finally realizing your business ownership dreams. I look forward to speaking with you soon. One of the ways that I’ve done this, curious to see your thoughts, is to block out those personal commitments. A dinner date here, I’m taking my kid here, my gym time, so blocking that out can kind of, okay, what do I have left? Is that a good approach as well?

Andrew Hartman (26:23):

Yes sir. Absolutely. You’re reading my mind. Henry, you read the framework before I showed up. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, so once you decide that the time you’re going to work, the next step is to get your personal commitments on there. I see,

Henry Lopez (26:34):

Okay.

Andrew Hartman (26:35):

Because for me, if I’m going to work eight to six, those are the times I’m trying to dedicate. If I look at that then and I need to be with my kids for lunch or I need to go to a doctor’s appointment or whatever those things are, they detract. If you think about your time like currency, you are spending some of that currency on those items and so you want to represent that. So you can probably see where we’re going and you already alluded to it, Henry, our calendar is going to become our to-do list. Our calendar is going to be the way that we represent the work to be done in front of us. So if you need to be at the doctor from four to 5:00 PM on Tuesday, you cannot schedule anything else from four to five on Tuesday and including drive time on the front end on the backend because we’re just starting to be honest with ourselves about where our time is going.

Andrew Hartman (27:25):

So once that’s in place, the next thing before we put items on our calendar, the next thing that is one of the key takeaways I want people to do this week if they can is put a thing on their calendar. I call whirlwind or you might call Buffer and all this is before you start calendar blocking in, you are simply representing on your calendar the fact that you cannot perfectly predict and control what’s going to happen in your calendar. And so what I recommend is if people have more control of their time, if you’re a solopreneur and maybe you are a contractor or computer programmer where you have a lot of control over your time, you don’t have to be on a lot of meetings, you may not need as much whirlwind if you’re a person in customer support or sales where you need to be very responsive and you won’t know what’s coming in tomorrow As you step into work, you need a bit more whirlwind.

Andrew Hartman (28:14):

But the idea here is whirlwind represents the fact that there’s going to be email, phone calls, client drop-ins, last second meetings, tasks that I underestimate all the chaos that we can’t control. We’re simply representing that on our calendar before we start time blocking because we can’t perfectly control those things. When I was younger, I wanted to control them. I literally was trying to eliminate and it’s impossible. And one of my mantras in my late twenties as I was working through this was the chaos is here to stay and I just wanted to come to terms with the fact that I cannot control everything. So my calendar needs to represent that fact.

Henry Lopez (28:50):

The thing that I have found is when we plan, when we block out, we then, if we will help our team understand that unless the place is really on fire, that’s when I want you to come to me. That’s when we’re going to schedule time as opposed to what we I think have the very much tendency to enable, which has come to me all the time. So we’ll set these boundaries with our team as well as to they’ll know or I’ll tell them Tuesday morning, I’m working on something. It needs to wait until our meeting on Wednesday unless again, it really is a true fire. Right? That’s part of it as well. Is that what you’ve observed?

Andrew Hartman (29:34):

Yes, exactly. Correct. Amy, that’s so wise on your part. One of the things we talk about in time Boss is that you often have to retrain relationships.

Henry Lopez (29:42):

Correct?

Andrew Hartman (29:43):

And what you said is perfect. So really everyone’s very rational. What they’re looking for is confidence that you can help meet their need and empathy that you care about the needs that they have. And we’re always following our paths of least resistance. So for me, before I started implementing this stuff, people would just ping me on Slack or teams or text messages because I was just the way that to solve the problem, they weren’t, you were enabling them, right? Yeah. They weren’t trying to no

Henry Lopez (30:10):

Disrupt you, they just

Andrew Hartman (30:11):

No, not at all.

Andrew Hartman (30:13):

I just, I hadn’t showed ’em another way. And so sometimes it’s as simple as saying with empathy and confidence, you say, man, I really want to make sure I’m being a great teammate or I’m supporting you really well. You can say this to clients as well, I know your needs are so important, I want to make sure I’m really supporting you well, if it’s on fire, would you please call me on the phone if I see you call and I’ll answer that call. If not, would you mind emailing me or waiting until our next meeting and I’ll make sure we take care of it then and we’ll get you in great shape. And that alone, just that simple sentence, if that resonated with people, I would just rewind it and say that word for word. I have used that with so many stakeholders in my life and they’re very reasonable because what I told them was, no matter what your needs going to be met, I’m simply asking you to reserve fires for the phone and otherwise we’ll get it done some other way.

Henry Lopez (31:00):

Great idea. Yeah. Alright, so the buffer allocating that or would you call it whirlwind time? Yep,

Andrew Hartman (31:07):

Whirlwind time. Yep. And then once that’s there, this is really the easy part. So you think about what you’ve done, you’ve prioritized your list, you’ve broken it down to one to four hour tasks, you have these discreet tasks, clear definition of done, write a job description, get feedback from stakeholders, whatever. You’ve got your calendar set for next week in terms of when you’re going to work, you’ve added in your buffer, you’ve added in your personal items, now you’re just filling in the blanks. So 8:00 AM on Monday I’m adding write a job description, 9:00 AM on Monday. I’m adding get feedback from stakeholders in my life. And so you’re just calendar blocking in. As you said Henry, you’re mapping those tasks into your calendar in those available slots. And honestly it’s kind of easy at this point. You’ve manufactured tasks that now you can map to your calendar.

Andrew Hartman (31:50):

And again, like I mentioned, your calendar’s really becoming your to-do list. Now, as you can imagine, Henry, everyone listening to this phone call, you are going to get through, let’s say you decided to work through 6:00 PM on Friday. You’re going to get through 6:00 PM on Friday and you’re going to go back, look at that big list you created. I called the backlog. You’re going to look at your backlog and you’re going to see tasks on there that hurt you, that they didn’t make it to your calendar where you’re going to feel pain intention that those items didn’t make it there. And this is one of the key parts of the time boss framework. One of our key mantras is reality is our friend, and you just have to speak honestly about that. So again, the reality is if you’ve done the work to get items to your calendar, you’ve mapped it there, you’ve added whirlwind to make it realistic, those tasks weren’t going to fit there anyways. So you have a couple options now. One is you can certainly work more, right? And that’s often our default is we just choose to work more and that

Henry Lopez (32:44):

Is your choice. I’ll just work tomorrow, Saturday, I’ll spend, I catch up tomorrow.

Andrew Hartman (32:47):

Correct? And that’s your choice. You absolutely can. I think there are other ways to think about that and here’s what I would encourage people to think about. Can you defer it or can you defer items that you put on your calendar? Maybe there’s items that you put on your calendar that are not urgent, that don’t have to happen this week. Can you simply put those items back in your backlog knowing that seven days from now you’re going to do a weekly planning meeting again and you can map it to your calendar then? So truly you’re giving yourself permission not to think about that item for the next seven days. You’re leaving it in your backlog. It doesn’t have to be touched until next week. Another is could you delegate it? So delegation, if you’re a solopreneur, obviously you may not have anyone on your team, but is there a virtual assistant that could help you? Could someone on five or help you with anything that is on your list or Upwork or anything like that? Do you have a spouse or a friend or a partner or an investor or someone else around that might be able to support you on tasks that you have on your list? So again, you’re simply looking to either get items off your calendar that you already added or to support items that are still in your backlog that didn’t make it to your calendar.

Andrew Hartman (33:53):

Can you digitize them? I know I’m sure Henry, you’re talking about ai. Everyone’s talking about ai. Could you leverage chat GBT for the job description for example? That’s a great thing to take to chat GBT and say, Hey, can you look at companies similar to me that look like X, Y, Z can give me a job description for a sales director? That could be a starting for me. Maybe that cuts that task in half and gives you more time, gives you more room to get items onto your calendar. Sometimes we need to delete things. So you might have a list like that already. The average person has 121 items on their to-do list, which is absolutely overwhelming. And you probably collected some of those items six months ago at a conference you were at or you listened to a podcast or something and it’s no longer relevant, no

Henry Lopez (34:38):

Longer, sorry, it’s

Andrew Hartman (34:39):

Just noise. Can you just delete it? It’s just noise. Every time you look at it, you’re feeling guilt about it. If you’re not going to do it, if it’s not going to move your business forward, if it doesn’t move the needle, can you just delete it? And then once you go through all those steps again, if you just have to do it, if you have a promise or commitment, then now is the time in this weekly planning meeting and this sober moment for you to say, you know what, next week I’m going to work four additional hours or I’m going to work eight additional hours. You choose whatever you need to do, but again, it’s not this daily free for all that you’re throwing yourself into in a very sober moment. You are deciding as your time boss that this is the amount of time that I’m going to work next week with conviction. It’s not happening to you. You are choosing it because you care about the outcomes that is fundamentally different than just showing up it’s 5:00 PM on a Friday night and you still have six things on your to-do list and deciding to work Saturday that is going to feel totally different than a week prior you making the decision that you’re going to work extra, you talking to the stakeholders in your life to make sure you can work it out. Those are fundamentally different experiences.

Henry Lopez (35:40):

Agreed.

Andrew Hartman (35:41):

And so the key there again is just really dealing with the items that don’t fit. And that was such a game changer for me in reducing my stress and anxiety.

Henry Lopez (35:50):

What I have found also is that I want to come back to a moment here to the habit part of this, but what I find is that as you do this, the more you do it, the better and better and better you get at it and applying the constraint, which I think is one of the brilliant parts here, key takeaway from what you’ve shared that allows us to say, no, I’m not going to solve this by adding more hours because here’s what I always believe. I could work 24 hours straight for the next seven days and I still won’t get to everything on my to-do

Andrew Hartman (36:21):

List. Right? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Henry Lopez (36:23):

So the point is a lot of that is noise. To your point as well, if I focus on what’s most important, as you said would boost the needle and work on those things, then I have to first accept I’m not going to get to everything and that’s okay, but am I getting to what’s most important? Yeah,

Andrew Hartman (36:42):

Right, exactly.

Henry Lopez (36:43):

But I think again, that what happens to us is we come to this place in life as a business owner with being great task managers. I get shit done on my list,

Andrew Hartman (36:56):

Right?

Henry Lopez (36:57):

No matter what it takes, I’m that guy. And so we think that that’s the only way to operate a business, right? Because now I’m accountable to myself and I can hear my dad saying, speaking in my ears, saying, well just work more, work harder. So all of these things are great. I got to believe that this is, I read one of the things as I was getting ready or you might’ve suggested this question about finding your highest sustainable pace while avoiding burnout. Is that what we’re talking about here?

Andrew Hartman (37:26):

Yep, absolutely. And that goes into your thoughts about habit that you were mentioning, Henry. So here’s the idea. So our highest sustainable pace is us the most that we can deliver, the highest impact that we can make without stress, anxiety, and burnout being attacks on those results. And really the thing that we don’t realize about stress, anxiety and burnout is that they actually diminish our impact. So we actually do worse work. Absolutely. We make poor decisions. We don’t think creatively. We don’t think openly. And

Henry Lopez (37:57):

It builds obviously. It builds,

Andrew Hartman (37:59):

Builds, absolutely. And so there is a pocket for excellent execution that all of us have. And unfortunately it’s different for all of us. So that’s why I say I have no judgment. If you work 80 hours, I can’t do it. But if you can do it and you can deliver phenomenal results and you don’t feel the burn of stress and anxiety while you do that, you should do it. Please go make massive impact on the world.

Henry Lopez (38:23):

I have found that some of us, as entrepreneurs in particular, can do it for a period of time when it’s necessary in a startup phase, but that then everybody ends up burning out if they try to do it forever. Most of us. Yeah.

Andrew Hartman (38:37):

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s where I think agency is so important. We are a hundred percent in control of our life at all times. And so it’s important for us to choose it and say, and with the stakeholders in our life, with our spouses, with our friends, with our investors, that we’re all on the same page. Let’s get ahead of it. Let’s talk honestly about how much of my life is this going to require of me and are we all comfortable with that? Are we all on the same page? And so I think just doing some of that work ahead of time I think is so critical. So

Henry Lopez (39:07):

I think that also just interject there. If that’s got to be at some point, one of the benefits of owning my own business is that I do have that control, otherwise what the heck am I doing to myself?

Andrew Hartman (39:20):

Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. I fully affirm that. So the value of the habit then is this, I don’t have to be perfect at this week, I just need to take the next step and seven days from now, again, the first step in the weekly planning process is reflection is just evaluating am I delivering on the results that I care about, that I’m responsible for? And am I doing so without stress, fear, anxiety, burnout? And if you’re not delivering on the results, certainly you have to course correct. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or you’re feeling that stress, fear and anxiety, again, you got to course correct. You’ve got to find the solution from those items. And the value of really locking in this in as a habit then is every single week you can make those tiny little adjustments. Again, you’re not going to be perfect at this week.

Andrew Hartman (40:10):

You may not even be perfect at it a week or a month from now, but if you’re consistently making adjustments, I’m 700 weekly planning meetings into this now I’ve done this for so long and I’ve paid attention and just every week made a tiny little adjustment. I’m not taking massive swings. I’m making minor adjustments each week for me to find my highest sustainable pace. And as someone that’s lived it and representing a community of people that have lived it, I can’t tell you what an impact it has. Both on your experience of work, your again, that feeling of peace, freedom and clarity and on the results that you get. We don’t realize how much we diminish our results by stress and anxiety, how we limit ourselves and our creative thinking and our impact and the quality of work that we do on anything we’re focusing on when we’re feeling that stress and anxiety.

Henry Lopez (40:58):

Agreed. Agreed. So you touched on it, but I want to circle back to this development of this habit. What I see when I work with my clients and teach ’em a similar model here of planning the week and prioritizing, they get off to good intentions and then the week happens, right? The chaos happens, the one vehicle broke down, so now I have to change my plans or somebody didn’t show. And I’ll talk about, this happens in all environments, but likely where you’ve got some teams or people that could let you or a customer issue, and it seems like that then derails the whole week. What do you say to people that are at that stage to help them stick to this and what are some incremental things that they can do to hopefully make the habit that it needs to be?

Andrew Hartman (41:53):

Yeah, great question Henry. I love that. One of my favorite quotes is Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. And it’s true. That’s true. It’s very real. So first thing I’ll say is that’s where whirlwind is so critical. Yes. We just can’t control. And so most people, they’ll hear about time blocking and they’re like, oh, that sounds so great. And I love the concept of seeing myself make progress and I love the feeling of control. It gives me when I’m planning and then they get into their week and it doesn’t go according to plan. And then they just feel overwhelmed by moving things around on their calendar and all the things that they didn’t get done.

Henry Lopez (42:29):

And then it leads to, this doesn’t work. I am not ready for this.

Andrew Hartman (42:33):

Correct, yeah. Or I’m a failure. I mean, it only increases the shame or the stress that they’re feeling, which is so sad. So one, I think whirlwinds critical, and again, you shrink and expand whirlwind based off your level of control. So if the situations you described Henry are happening often you should have more whirlwind

Andrew Hartman (42:49):

Just being, again, reality is your friend. That stuff’s going to happen. You don’t know what it is, but it’s coming one way or another. So just plan accordingly. And again, the value of whirlwind, the magic part about whirlwind, some people are like, I can’t imagine blocking off three hours of my day and planning to not work at that time. But the reality is, it’s not that you’re planning to not work. You’re planning for the things that might come. However, if they don’t come, especially for the people listening to this solopreneurs, entrepreneurs starting their own business, you care about the results you’re trying to achieve. If you don’t need whirlwind, just collapse your whirlwind and grab whatever the priority is for 8:00 AM tomorrow morning and start working on it today. And when you do that and you start playing from ahead, the fundamental experience of work changes. You no longer are living that narrative. I’m always behind. But you begin to feel that sense of you’re playing from ahead and you bring a whole different level of focus to work when you’re playing from ahead.

Speaker 1 (43:42):

So

Andrew Hartman (43:43):

Again, I would lean into whirlwind. That’s a big one. The other again, is just really looking at it like a habit. Imagine if you go to the gym, let’s say you’ve never worked out and you go to the gym and you do a bunch of bicep curls. It’s like coming home and expecting your spouse or your girlfriend or your friends to be like, oh man, your arms look so much bigger. That’s not how it works. Changing our relationship with time is a habit. You have lived into whatever habits you have right now related to time. Sometimes for decades we’ve done this. And so we have to give ourselves some room again, leverage, whirlwind to deal with reality, leverage that weekly planning meaning to be very reflective and make adjustments, but we’ve got to build some resiliency that it’s going to take time. You’re going to have to get past that friction, and eventually you’re going to get punched in the face and you’re going to navigate past it and you’re going to lean into the system and it’s going to work for you where it will become your new floor. It will become the new threshold of your expectation for how your week’s going to operate. You just got to build that habit.

Henry Lopez (44:46):

Yeah, that makes sense. Well said. Alright. Tell me more about the services that you offer through Time Boss, and also I believe there’s a masterclass that you offer. So tell me about all of that if you would.

Andrew Hartman (44:57):

Yeah, absolutely. So Time Boss partners with individuals and teams to teach this framework. So again, it’s a seven day framework that can be adopted into any environment. So we do workshops to help individuals or teams learn the Time Boss Framework. We do group coaching that helps people both learn and adopt it. So it really helps them work through the friction over a six to eight week period. We have a digital course that helps people learn and adopt the Time Boss frameworks, a variety of ways that people can participate and then if typically with teams, we support them ongoing in ongoing education, ongoing workshops, that type of thing. And yeah, you mentioned the masterclass. I love the masterclass. It is a 90 minute overview of what we just discussed in detail. It will help you run your very first weekly planning meeting. It’ll show you how to run your week, how to deal with interruptions and diversions. We didn’t get into the Daily Review meeting, but there’s a daily meeting as well and it’ll walk you through how to do that 90 minutes, it’s free on the Time Boss website, time Boss us slash masterclass, or if you go to the Time Boss website and tap on resources, you’ll see a bunch of free resources there. So a huge believer that information should be free, education should be free. If you need help with implementation or taking the next step, would love to chat more.

Henry Lopez (46:14):

Excellent, excellent. Well, I’ll have a link to that site on the show notes page to this episode at the how of business.com as well. Alright. I’m always looking for a book recommendation. You mentioned it already, atomic Habits. Why do you recommend that book?

Andrew Hartman (46:29):

James Clear took something that we all know about. We know about habits, the science has been out there forever and he simplified it in a way that makes it a tool that you can use. I just love what he did in breaking down habits into these simple processes, including the science behind it that really helps us get up and running with anything. And so even he’s of and influence the way I think about Time Boss and how I teach Time Boss to really lean into that weekly planning meeting as a habit that what becomes most important in a new habit is reps and just getting reps showing up no matter what and building that experiential equity that you’re the kind of person that can do that habit. So it’s a great one. If you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend it. I promise it will have a positive impact on your business. For anyone that’s listening, I think they value it.

Henry Lopez (47:17):

Thank you. Thanks you for that recommendation. Alright, we’ll wrap it up here. Andrew, what’s one thing you want to stick away from this conversation, especially again on this topic that we focus on of controlling your time and as you say, wrangling the chaos, optimizing time, avoiding burnout, what’s one thing you want to stick away?

Andrew Hartman (47:36):

Yeah, I think the one thing I would give everyone the scene is reality is your friend, just speaking honestly about this stuff, if you are in a mode where you are just shoveling faster and you’re just trying to keep going and you’re working every hour of the day that you have, my strong consideration for you is to take a pause, think honestly about where you’re at, strongly encourage you to consider constraining your time and saying, this is the amount of life I’m willing to give to this endeavor. Add in that whirlwind, give yourself some realistic buffer and then try to move forward. Again, I just think I was that person. I was you. I was working nonstop every hour that I had and it broke me down over time. And I just would love for you to know that there’s another path forward.

Henry Lopez (48:20):

And again, as we’ve touched on, it’s what then will allow you, the US be able to realize the freedoms of business ownership. And one of those freedoms is time to spend on other thing, on other people. If you’re not realizing that, then what the heck are we doing to ourselves? Right?

Andrew Hartman (48:35):

Right.

Henry Lopez (48:36):

But I love to all of that. I think the thing that I would echo is a huge takeaway for me. A lot of things you shared that were very actionable, but this constraint on our time I think is a brilliant way to think about it. And again, if we will just make that mindset shift, Andrew, I think that’ll help all of us to begin to make progress on managing our time and being our own time boss. I think that’s brilliant.

Andrew Hartman (49:03):

Awesome.

Henry Lopez (49:04):

Tell me again where you want us to go online to learn more.

Andrew Hartman (49:07):

Yeah, time Boss Us. And on there there’s the resources tab, a bunch of free resources for planning, quarterly goals, the masterclass and others that I think will be valuable for everyone.

Henry Lopez (49:16):

Fantastic. Andrew, wonderful conversation. Thanks for sharing all of the actionable information, really great stuff. I appreciate you taking the time to be with me today.

Andrew Hartman (49:26):

Thanks so much, Henry. Grateful. Thank you.