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Life by Design is a podcast that shares the experiences and tools to help couples align their wealth goals and reclaim their time, enabling them to experience freedom, abundance, and a life by design.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to the Life by Design Podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We support couples in achieving their wealth goals by sharing our journey of overcoming barriers to build our financial empire.
Brian Persson: [00:00:21] Did you want to know more about what's stopping you from building your wealth? Make sure to go to discoverlifebydesign.ca/wealth and download our guide, 'The 3 Mistakes that Keep High Achieving Couples from Building their Wealth, Freedom & Living a Life they Love'.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:38] Today, our topic is 'The Top 3 Ways to Get Back Your Time'. Everyone complains they never have enough time, they're too busy. So Brian, why is it so important to us to get back our time?
Brian Persson: [00:00:53] I would say peace of mind, because if we're consistently overwhelmed with everything and we think that we never have enough time, our minds are not in a good state. So for us, it's important to have that free time for our family, for ourselves, for the people around us and not be consistently feeling like we're underwater.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:14] So it's more proactive than reactive. And how does that play into wealth?
Brian Persson: [00:01:20] It's a very important measure of wealth. The amount of free time specifically that you have, because everyone's got the same 24 hours in the day, but how much of that 24 hours is free time, and how much of it is time that you can do what you want with? If you can carve out more of that day to do whatever you want, then that is a sign of wealth.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:43] Absolutely. So what is the first takeaway? It is setting boundaries, learning to say no, which was a big one for me, but to unnecessary commitments or distractions. You want to protect your time by setting clear boundaries for work, family, personal life, you name it.
Brian Persson: [00:02:04] Saying no, huge in this society. I don't think most people do it, primarily. We watch people all around us that are constantly saying yes to family and to friends and to their kids, and their life is really restricted.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:23] It was a hard lesson for me to learn to say no, and while I've vastly improved, I still struggle with it. There will be times our little guy will come to us and say, hey mummy, you want to go play this game or something, and I get this little knack of guilt in my rib cage going, I so do want to play with you, but mommy has work. So it's picking that. Then there's other times where, a very recent example, I'm working with an external contractor that I paid to help me with some of my speaking stuff, and they're just throwing things at me. You got to write this article, this deadline's tomorrow, you got to do this presentation. I'm also working a full time contract, and we got real estate, and we got our kids. Instead of saying no, I went into 'overwhelm' and tried to conquer it all, and it just consumed me. Then I watched it play out, didn't even know what to do with it as I watched it play out and it impacted you and the boys and my health, I lost my appetite. It's like, wow Jess, take time now, figure this out, because this is not good for anyone and there's no reason for it. I can say no and give timelines on when I can produce certain things and respond to certain things and figure it out.
Brian Persson: [00:03:42] There's a lot of layers to 'no'. For example, you could have said no from the beginning of that, but the contract with this lady was really something you needed and really something you wanted. You said yes out of it, not quite knowing into the future that all these particular timelines were going to collide, so you're a little bit a victim of circumstance. At the same time, inside of that, you can 'micro-no' your situation where you can say no in particular moments even though you said yes to the holistic side of things. There's different layers of it. The kids are fantastic example, you can say no to kids and not have them at all and then save all your time.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:35] I don't know if I call that a fantastic example because they're amazing.
Brian Persson: [00:04:38] Fantastic example in terms of an extreme example, that's very tangible to bite off.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:44] Can you give the audience an example when you say you could do 'micro-no's’.
Brian Persson: [00:04:48] That's what I was getting at with the kids. How many times a day do kids ask you for things?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:56] All the time. And how many times do we say no?
Brian Persson: [00:04:59] Exactly. You're saying no all the time. There's lessons in that. Why are you saying no all the time? The kids are basically seeing cracks that you aren't seeing, and they are trying to manipulate those cracks by asking you all these questions and you don't know how to react to it, so you just say no. But really you, somewhere else, have said yes for them to get to the point of asking you that question.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:30] Or they just have no filters and they're going to ask anyways.
Brian Persson: [00:05:33] So it's tricky, no can be tricky. You can get affected by previous 'yes's you said yes to, previous things you agreed to that are now resulting in you really wanting to say no.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:48] It's true.
Brian Persson: [00:05:49] And that's why you have to be so diligent and aware of what you're agreeing to, because it might seem easy today, but that thing that you said yes to even a year ago or two years ago is all of a sudden coming back to you, and it's causing you to say a lot of 'no's where you perhaps shouldn't have even had to have the question asked to you. Business for us was a big one. Five years ago, I think it was at this point, we started saying yes to all kinds of business. We were just trying to bite off every type of business and real estate we could possibly find. Now we're okay, we've started to manage it, but it took a solid two years for us to clean up all that business that we said yes to and get the 'no's into an appropriate portion. We had a nice balance between yes's and no's and we weren't constantly underwater with our time. It took a long time for us to clean up all that stuff, and we didn't see it when we first started saying yes.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:04] That's a great point you make, because it's kind of like a shiny object syndrome. We're like, this is a great idea, we can make money this way, this way, blah, blah, blah, and we're so excited. Then we would go and do it, and now we're managing five business ideas and we're like, how did this happen? I have zero time, I can't even manage one. You're absolutely a lot more successful when you can focus on one thing at a time. Having someone who says, I got five business ideas that I'm working on, I'm sitting there going, but are you? Not one of them can be successful if you're constantly juggling five ideas, five different types of clients, five different sets of teams, it's just not going to be successful. You need to come to the fact that you manage one very successful and well, and then once it's off and launched and it's running smoothly and you've got it managed by other people, sure, bring in another idea. But we're talking years here, we're not talking like it's going to happen overnight, or months. This can take 2 to 5 years to build a solid business, and you should focus on just that one business to make it successful. I think in there comes one really key point is, limiting distractions. Whether it's other business ideas, whether it's distractions in your day. I know whenever we get a hot new shiny object, you might come home from some networking event and you'll tell me, we can help people this way and this way. Now I'm just, no. That is not our lane, let's stick to our lane until we've really figured everything out. But it's easy, I get it too. It goes with distractions. I know when you used to have your office in the common area of our house, we've now switched, I'm there and you're down here. I would come up whenever I was taking a break from what I'm working on, and I'd ask you questions.
Brian Persson: [00:08:57] You were passing right through, effectively, my office.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:59] I was going to the kitchen and get a bite, and you were "there" so I would just start talking or asking questions. I had to learn that that wasn't okay, because you could be in the middle of, I knew when you were on a call so I didn't distract there, but you could be in the middle of writing something or in the middle of responding to something, and it was just very distracting so we had to set boundaries. We set in our calendar when we're going to chat, or we take a lunch break together and I could throw some ideas at you, but we had to limit that. Same with kids, we had to set clear boundaries. If Mommy or Daddy are on a call, you do not come into our office and just start asking us about Minecraft or Legos. That took time, that didn't happen overnight, that took some weeks, and sometimes there are still reminders where it's like, hey, we're on a call!
Brian Persson: [00:09:45] Again, going back to kids, they push their luck all the time. They're always aiming for the 'yes'. Those micro distractions are really big. I read a study, I can't remember the exact number of minutes, but it's something like 15 to 20 minutes it takes your brain to come back on to the original track that it was on. If you're working on a particular task and then someone comes in and interrupts you, you're not fully in that deep focus again for at least 15 to 20 minutes. If you're hammering out whatever task it is, being really creative or being really productive, you really need to have no distractions. If you can get rid of those distractions or manage your environment properly, you will be more productive in less time.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:37] Absolutely. Talking about being more productive, taking regular breaks and rests in between. You can't just go hard all day all the time, it hurts the head. It doesn't give you that ability to refresh and calm down and reflect. That might actually give you more time, because maybe what you were about to keep cranking out in a certain task, you might not need. You just didn't take the time to stop and breathe, to be like, where am I at with this? What does it look like? What's left remaining? So just take that space, and you'll avoid burnout as well and it gives you a mental break.
Brian Persson: [00:11:16] On different scales, again. Daily breaks, how is your day arranged so that you can take care of yourself and take care of your family and take care of your business all at the same time. Because you can't sacrifice yourself for two weeks or a month and then finally think you're going to take a break. Just manage your day in a way that consistently takes care of you and then have larger, more freeing breaks where you maybe take a week off. I recently joined a business group, and out of the ten people in the group, you can clearly tell who takes breaks and who does not. They almost don't have to tell me anything about what's happening inside of their business. You can tell by their state of mind and how frazzled they are in, sometimes, regular conversations. You're just chatting about your kids and you can clearly tell they're a little bit frazzled just in the conversation. Then you get into their business, once I started to get to know these people, and sure enough, the people who are taking breaks, the people who are taking care of themselves are generally having the more fluid, growing businesses. The people who are really frazzled and never taking breaks, they're constantly struggling. Their businesses are successful, but they're constantly struggling inside of their business and seeing things that perhaps aren't there. Their business isn't growing fast enough, or their business is taking too much time from them. Yes, because you're not taking care of yourself. You're not saying no to your business when it's appropriate.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:59] That actually lends well into our next takeaway. Delegating and outsourcing. Delegating tasks that others can handle or outsource where possible, it frees up time for high value activities in your business and for yourself. This is a big one that we also had to learn and overcome, and I think we're getting much better. We delegate and outsource for sure now. Would you like to share some of our story on that?
Brian Persson: [00:13:29] Real estate is the easiest example. Not only for us, but I see it over and over again. Most people, when they start in real estate, they try to do it all themselves. Early on, I can think of some situations before I even had an investment, when I had my first real estate property for me. I would try to fix my toilet or something like that, whatever was going wrong, and I remember there was this one particular valve, and I probably had to go to Home Depot ten times to find the right valve for this stupid toilet, because I had no skills in trying to fix this particular leak. Back then it seemed expensive to hire a plumber, but I should have just hired the plumber. I would have saved so many hours of going back and forth, but here I am thinking, I got to keep the costs low and I got to manage my money. Nope, I should have managed my time and then got more into making more money.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:40] I think we've learned that lesson a few times, even with our rental properties. There were times you would try and go do it, a day later you come home. I'm like, how are you doing? And you're like, it's not fixed, I'm gonna hire someone. I'm like, oh my gosh, we just lost a day. Well, 'we' being you in your time. You really got to assess what's really worth it? If it's not your expertise, outsource it. Don't even think about, I can do it, because you got to factor in all the time it's going to take for you to learn it. The mistakes, because we all make mistakes when we're learning something new. Assess, is that worth it? Is that making you money or can you outsource it for a less cost and focus on what does make you money in your business, in your real estate, in your family.
Brian Persson: [00:15:22] I don't want to minimize the mental hurdle people are going to have to go through to get to that. It was a really big hurdle for us. Nowadays, instead, I manage rather than actually do the work. If I need a plumber, I have a list of plumbers, and if one of those plumbers is not available and I have to take on a new plumber, then I will go to the property with that plumber and I will watch how he operates. I'll build a relationship with the plumber, because eventually I can then trust him to go to the property and know how he's going to interact with my tenants and know how he's going to fix my property. Then at that point, my time is free and I can delegate more and more responsibility to that plumber. I do the same thing with my tenants too, actually. Too many people who are starting out in real estate, they feel like they got to do everything for their tenants. I really push the boundary on what my tenants will do for me, because most of the time they're happy to have a great landlord, and for you to be nice to them is really what they want. They will actually end up doing things for you, like gardening or weeding.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:45] Painting their own walls sometimes. It's perfect.
Brian Persson: [00:16:50] I try to build the relationship so that I can force delegation over into my real estate investments.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:59] I know when it comes around to getting your time back, one way that I watched you do it that was really impressive is, when we first started out and we were looking for a renter, one of our properties became vacant, or we got a new property and we have to fill it, and you would set viewings whenever, wherever it worked for them. But now, well not now, but you've done it probably a year or two ago at least, if not more, but I find you time-block. You'll book, say, from 11 to 1 on a Saturday as an example, and everyone's got to fit in that time box if they want to come see it. If not, sorry, you're going to have to wait until, I don't know, maybe Monday between 6 and 7. I find that streamlines your time, you know exactly what you're doing, you can get there so we can work around that in your calendar. It also, I think, sets the precedence for the potential incoming tenants. Because now they're like, this landlord is specific on how he does his time. I know you also have other ways they got to respond to you, but you're very particular and you instruct on what you need from them to make it work, and then they know what to expect from you.
Brian Persson: [00:18:10] I have really clear intentions with my tenants and that saves me a heck of a lot of time. Things like that where I will very specifically book a Saturday morning and a Monday night. If you can't fit into one of those places to come view the property, sorry, you're not working too hard to get into my property. I want someone who's going to walk over to my side and help me out, if you're going to be my tenant. It's not really the other way around. I'm not giving you a property that you can go and do whatever you want with because you're my tenant. I'm very intentional, and I think people get uncomfortable with that. They might look at it forceful. But really, tenants actually respect that. I find that I build better relationships with most of my tenants than most of the other real estate investors that we know.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:08] I think we as humans need structure, schedules, boundaries, timelines. We know what to do and how to react, it's not a surprise, so of course we work better within it. But sometimes we get caught up in the, I want to make it work for them, and I want to be nice, and I don't want to look like the bad guy. That doesn't work.
Brian Persson: [00:19:29] I did that way too much at the beginning of our real estate portfolio. Way too much.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:32] Coming back to delegation and outsourcing, make sure when you do review and reflect regularly because it may not always work. We've known that, there's times we've outsourced and 2 or 3 weeks in we realized this person just isn't a fit for what we're looking for. It's okay, let it go, move on. It's a mistake you learn from, don't hold on with the hope that they're going to get better. Instinctively, you know if they're going to work or not, make it work for how it is and just move on so it's not impacting your time long term, because now you're fixing what they're doing or you're trying to teach them a different way and maybe they're not coachable. So review and see what's working and what's not working.
Brian Persson: [00:20:20] I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk that says that. Hire fast, fire faster. I'm pretty sure I watched something on him. Whoever it was, the mentality is hire fast, fire faster. That works across the board. Even with my tenants, if I start to detect a problem, I'm on them until they either come over to my side or I have to evict them. That rarely happens because as soon as they know that there's parameters that they have to abide by inside of one of my properties, they usually don't. Unless, which I've had, they're totally crazy. They don't go out of those parameters and they're good once they understand them. Kids are the same thing. Be careful on how airtight your parameters are. Like we were talking earlier, they will find the holes.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:18] They will find the loopholes, 100%. All right, so what is takeaway number three? Find tools that work for you.
Brian Persson: [00:21:29] There are so many tools out there that you can use to get back your time. Anything from, we were talking about it earlier, virtual assistants to software. To not have sticky notes and endless things written on your fridge magnet board, things like that. Software that you can interact with your team. For you and I, we use a program called Asana, and inside of that we have all of our tasks go into there. You know exactly what's happening for you, I know what's happening for me. Our contractors know exactly what's happening for them, and there's never any question about what's going on.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:17] There are a lot of online tools that can automate your routine things, like email responses, calendar scheduling, social media posts. We know, one of the vendors we outsource to, she uses tools to automate certain postings. There are some incredible tools out there, you just got to do some research and figure out what's going to work for you.
Brian Persson: [00:22:36] Other tools are mentalities, like the 80-20 rule. Write down whatever is happening in a particular task, or if you're experiencing 'overwhelm', write down all the things that you need to do and chop out the bottom 80% and take on the top 20%. By that I mean, what are the most important, most productive tasks that you're going to be able to take on.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:05] That falls in line with prioritizing your tasks. I know I'm usually pretty good at this, and I know for a while, sometimes you struggle with it. I remember I'd come up and I could see you're frazzled. You know when someone's spinning, and you're like, I just have so much on my plate. So I'd be like, walk me through it. I'd take a sticky note or something, and I'd take each task that you felt overwhelmed with, and I would just pare it down and be like, when is this due? What's the priority of it? What does it look like from terms of amount of work? Then I'd be like a puzzle piece. Okay, this is what you work on, these can happen tomorrow, this can happen next week. You'd just be peaceful. Now it's like, I didn't see it that way. If you can, like you said, prioritize it and then just drop the bottom 80 if they're not a priority. Then you're freeing up your time and your space on how you're working with things.
Brian Persson: [00:23:59] Other people are fantastic tools to help you out, buy more time back. Whether that's delegation as an employee or as a virtual assistant, or another person to just help you reflect. Because sometimes the worst place that you can make decisions and try to be efficient in is your own head. When you're in your own head, you get stuck there and you start to repeat the same patterns over and over again. That's why I come to you to say, here are all the things I'm challenged by. You tell me what you see is the most important, because right now I am looking at them all as burning dumpster fires.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:43] You do, and to me it's easy because I'm not in it, per se. I don't even know the history of half of your tasks so to me it's like, keep it factual. I'm taking out all the emotion, all the baggage, all the extra thoughts and being like, what's the task? Who owns it? What's the priority? When's it due? Then we'll figure out what this is going to look like. Another good tool to use is to streamline your meetings. I know this is a great one I use in my project management. We all have meetings after meetings after endless meetings. It gets to a point where it's like, you can't get anything done if you're constantly running from meeting to meeting. We don't need all these meetings, just book them when they're necessary and keep them concise with clear agendas and goals. I find I'll go in with my project schedule, for example, when I'm doing project management with my team, I'll book 30 minutes and odds are I'm out in 10 to 15. I've had people compliment me on it and be like, you're in it. I'm like, guys, I don't want to take your time. I know we all have a lot to do. I just need to know, where are we on these tasks? Where are there misses? Where can I help remove the hurdles? Where do we need to align? Who do we need to talk to? We'll go through all of them, and of course if there's issues, we use the 30 minutes and we'll talk through them. But if it's pretty clear cut, like I need a percent complete and I need new dates, why do I need to take 30 minutes when it's going to only need five minutes of your time? I find people appreciate that you're respecting their time and you understand that they have things to do, too. But it also works for you, you're getting back 15 minutes of a 30 minute call that was booked, or an hour or however long that looks.
Brian Persson: [00:26:26] You just described another tool, and that's called Parkinson's Law, which is that any task expands or contracts into the space given to it. If you only give your meeting 15 minutes, then you've got to get everything done in 15 minutes. If you give the meeting an hour, you're going to get the same thing done in that hour that you could have got done in 15 minutes. Elon Musk is an absolute monster with that. He's vicious with his meetings and keeping them tight and and effective. Obviously it shows, he's a billionaire.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:27:02] I love it. I'm still in meetings with some of my project management stuff and some of it's external, I'm working with external vendors. I'll be in a meeting and I'm watching the clock now going, I got another meeting right at the top of the hour. It's five minutes after the top of the hour and I'm going, sometimes people schedule, and they don't even stick to the scheduled meeting they have, they're going on and on. I'll just hop in and say, I got to run. At what point do you not think that, firstly, everyone else on that call might have other meetings or things they need to run to. Just keep it clear, concise and get to the point in your meetings and only book it because there's things you need to sort out. I do believe there are meetings that are necessary. A lot of people are like, do we need to meet? I'm like, yeah, because it gives the space, especially when it's in a team environment, for everyone to hear everything. So then if they have questions, you get it done, in and out in 30 minutes. I explained this to one of the managers last week when she was asking if her team needs to be there, I said, listen, your team can be there for 30 minutes, or if they're not, then the rest of this team is going to be sending them emails, questions, so is management, and they're going to get ad hoc emails that they're going to have to respond to, possibly ad hoc meetings. But they come 30 minutes, in and out you speak to it, they probably won't be bothered for the rest of the week as well. She's like, that's a good point.
Brian Persson: [00:28:27] Does the conversation serve you? Does the meeting serve you? If it doesn't, then don't go, or minimize your time inside of that. I think, again not trying to minimize the hurdle of this who are in the corporate world, because everyone wants to be nice. No one wants to be that jerk that tries to end the meeting sooner than anyone else thinks it should be ended. But at the same time, does it really need to be that long? Going back to tenants, I try to keep anything I do in a tenant's house very tight, because I know that they don't want me there, generally. They don't want someone fixing their plumbing for 4 or 5 hours inside of their house. If I can get it done in half an hour, then me and that plumber are in and out in half an hour. The tenant is more respectful of me because of that, and I have saved a lot of my time. Sometimes I pay the plumber the same amount as if he was there for four hours, but he fixed the problem. That's the goal, is that we can keep things tight and we can keep things moving, and it doesn't impact my tenants and doesn't impact me.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:29:44] Absolutely. Alright, I'm going to roll into recapping our takeaways from today. First one is to set boundaries, protect your time by creating clear boundaries for work, family and personal life. Takeaway two, delegate tasks that others can handle and outsource where possible, this frees up time for high value activities. Our third takeaway, is find tools that work for you. Our next topic is going to be on 'three ways we won in real estate'. Don't forget to go to discoverlifebydesign.ca/wealth and download 'The 3 Mistakes that Keep High Achieving Couples from Building their Wealth, Freedom & Living a Life they Love'.
Brian Persson: [00:30:21] We release podcasts every two weeks, so be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app to journey with us and create your life by design.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:30:30] Thanks for listening to the Life by Design Podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian.