How to use technology and productivity hacks to reclaim your time for things that matter
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, so why does it feel like we're working harder with less time now than any time in history?
Hi,
I think about whisks a lot. Yes, those kinds of whisks. The ones you use to whip eggs and do basic cooking tasks. Did you know that before the 19th century, whisks were basically just a bunch of sticks and thatch bundled together?
Think about how inefficient it would be to use a bunch of sticks to stir ingredients together. It took forever, and it severely limited the types of recipes that could realistically be executed on any given day.
Then, in the 19th century, this magical invention came onto the scene that promised to make cooking significantly easier and lower the bar for kitchen chefs everywhere. Except…that’s not what happened.
Instead of making existing recipes more efficient and making cooking take less time, what actually happened was the bar was raised for what was expected for the average cook to create on any given day. Out with cake, in with souffle.
Since cooking dinner was historically a burden overwhelmingly carried by women, so was this new expectation disproportionally carried by them That doesn’t really have specific relevance here, except it pisses me off every time I hear it. This burden extended beyond the making of the recipe, too, as cooks had to learn how to create these new recipes and test them to make sure they didn’t burn the whole house down in the process. When technology advanced from whisks to mechanical egg beaters onward to electric ones, those demands only increased.
This was not an isolated incident, either. Refrigeration had a similar cost burden, as instead of going to the store every day to find what was fresh and in stock, cooks now had nearly infinite choices at their disposal from around the world, which raised the expectations for the types of cuisine to cook. Even the humble stove made it so that you didn’t have to stand over a flame all day, but still, cooks spent the same amount of time cooking as they had a century before.
I am not a Luddite, but I do think they were onto something. Used as a slur in today’s day and age, the Luddites arose as a reaction to technology threatening their livelihoods.
About once a week, I get the overwhelming urge to smash some piece of technology, so I have respect for an organization that saw through the bull promising that technology was guaranteed to improve their lives. Yes, there are some great ways that technology has undoubtedly changed the world for the better. Two hundred years ago, 80% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today it’s 8%. During that same time, life expectancy has more than doubled.
People suffer less now, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Still, if everything is better, why do we have less time than our forefathers? Humanity historically worked 15 hours a week for most of our existence, yet with every new advancement, we become more “productive” without gaining any time. Now, we’re working 60-80 hours a week to keep our heads about water. Part of that is capitalism, which is silly, but another big part of this is technology promising to save us time when, in practice, it just raises expectations and alienates us from everyone around us.
Yet, technology marches on. AI is the new(ish) technology on the block, promising to save us time and money by automating much of our lives. However, instead of allowing people to work 15 hours a week, employers are expecting exponentially more output from the same amount of time.
This is also true with entrepreneurs. They are constantly pulled in a hundred different directions, trying to stay afloat, yet it is never enough.
It’s a problem that goes back all the way to the humble whisk, a harbinger of doom for all technological innovations to come. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Many strategies can help us reclaim our time, even as new technology like AI looms large over everything we do these days.
If you are too busy to do the things you like and can never get ahead, you are over-leveraged and in time debt. To get out of that debt, you need to find leverage points in your business to exploit.
If you are overleveraged, then you are most likely focused on too many low-margin activities, the kind of thing you can train somebody else to do and have nothing to do with your zone of genius. These are admin, customer service, data entry, and other tasks that are required to keep your business functioning but that you don’t personally have to do for your business to keep running.
These are called $5 tasks because you can hire them out for about $5-$15 (This is an old metric but still works to describe entry-level tasks). These are also the tasks that AI is best poised to handle right now. Whether it is setting meetings, doing tedious research, spell-checking your work, helping with marketing, or any number of low-level but necessary tasks, there is AI to help you do them better so you can reclaim large swaths of time.
You are probably (mostly) focused on $50 tasks. This is you being a technician in your business. You may think you cannot hire these tasks out, but you can probably hire parts of them.
I know this might sound expensive, but it allows you more time to do better work that will pay you more, and it allows you to turn around projects faster, which generates more revenue for your business.
If you don’t want to hire out, then you could increase productivity on each of those tasks. For instance, I increased my daily output from 1,000 words to 5,000 words without decreased quality, so I now finish a book in a fraction of the time, saving more time.
Another thing you can do is get existing clients to pay more. I know people generally hate raising their rates, but if you can double your rates and still retain 60% of your business, you are still ahead of the game. Plus, you have reclaimed half your time without decreasing your revenue.
If you aren’t comfortable doubling your rates off the bat, try increasing your rates by 10%-25% every quarter until you start seeing people balk at your new pricing. If you have a good relationship and communicate with your clients, they will generally be willing to pay more for your services to retain you.
Or you can decrease the churn in your business so more people stay year after year. Most businesses are not concerned with churn enough. If you know that 20% of your customers leave every year, and you can find a way to cut that to 10%, you have just removed the need to spend marketing dollars and time onboarding new clients by 50%.
Still, $50 tasks should not be the end goal of your creative business. When you are stuck at the $50 activities (or, even worse, $5 activities) in your business, the things you are definitely not focused on are the tasks that will grow your business, and those are the $500+ tasks.
These are the strategic partnerships you form and the products you launch with better results every single time. These $500+ tasks are ways you can double your income while halving your workload. They are the processes you put in place to offload your work so that you can take on more clients. These $500+ tasks are how you create leverage by productizing services, creating new products, or outsourcing.
I am not a particularly hard worker. I am just very good at finding leverage points and knocking over dominos. People are often surprised when I tell them how little I actually work because I generally seem so busy. But that is because I am excellent at leveraging myself and creating space to say yes to great opportunities and turning down bad ones.
It is possible to make the same money in 4 hours a day as you can in 16, and it is possible to create massive revenue in a very short amount of time. You just have to leverage yourself properly. It breaks my heart to see how so many people I know work without getting any gain.
In April 2018, I spent two amazing weeks on a book tour in Spain. During that time, I did many incredible things, but one I will never forget is that I got the opportunity to eat at a couple of Michelin-star restaurants while we were in San Sebastian.
One of them was called A Fuego Negro. Aside from the puppets with penises that adorned the wall, I remember it as the best meal I’ve ever had in my life. Fifteen courses of amazing food played like a record across my palette. I couldn’t believe how good that meal was, honest and true. It was perfection. Honestly, I never knew a meal could be so good.
On the menu, they had the year each course was added to the menu. The restaurant was over 10 years old, and there were pieces on the menu that spanned all of them, like the greatest hits of their past.
I’m sure the restaurant was amazing when it opened, but to deliver a world-class meal, it took ten years of refinement. It meant cutting really good menu items and replacing them with something great.
I run my business in a rather similar way. Every year, I take December off to examine everything I have tried in the past twelve months…and scrap everything that wasn’t pulling its weight, even if it worked in the past.
Through that process, I’ve jettisoned some really good strategies for growing my business to make way for great ones. I let go of things that worked well enough to keep me going to find ones that were world-class.
Since I only have so much brainpower and bandwidth, I was left asking if it would be okay to stay at the level I was at for the next 10 years. Since it wasn’t, I was forced to abandon things that were working decently.
Over the last few years, I’ve been able to construct a suite of world-class tools. There is still refinement to do to make it work perfectly, but there’s no doubt it’s working better than it ever has before.
An ecosystem is fragile. Introduce the wrong animals or vegetation, and it could send a perfectly balanced system into chaos. The same is true with any industry or even in your own practice.
Too often, people take on every responsibility thrown at them, whether it’s ideas for products, potential partnerships, conventions, or marketing efforts, without any thought as to how it will affect their ecosystem.
Part of this is naivete.
At the beginning of your career, you literally don’t know how your ecosystem works. You also don’t have the opportunity to turn down much work without setting yourself back.
So, you take on more and more.
Then, you establish yourself but never take the time to figure out how your ecosystem works. So you continue throwing junk and trash into your ecosystem until it is on the verge of destruction, leading to burnout or worse.
To find equilibrium with yourself, you must find a balance that is right for you, jettisoning things that don’t serve you, doubling down on things that light you up, and having enough space to recover.
The same is true when trying to place yourself in an industry. Whether it’s book publishing, SaaS products, or the world of food trucks, you need to find a way to become a beneficial part of the ecosystem...
...because if you aren’t, then the ecosystem will treat you as a cancerous growth to protect itself against, and it will be very hard to make headway.
As you go about building your career, tasks will arise that threaten to eat into your precious creating time—Meetings, interview requests, guest articles, upcoming launches, and more start to creep into your day, demanding your attention.
That is why you must be precious of the time you have to create and hold it sacred above everything else. If you don’t make it a habit from the beginning, it becomes nearly impossible to do it when other commitments start to intrude on it.
I’m a huge fan of time blocking and recommend it to any creative looking to protect their time. I generally use a time-blocking strategy that involves green time, yellow time, and red time.
With time blocking, you literally block out your schedule every day. Green time actions are ones that directly make you money. Maybe that’s working on a Kickstarter campaign, running ads, or building your community. Nothing impedes green time activities. However, green time activities can spill over onto yellow and red time.
Yellow time is admin time or something that indirectly leads to making money. Red time activities have nothing to do with your business.
The bottom line is that not all time is created equal. Some time is used on useless tasks. Some time is used for rest. Some time is used for making money. Some time is used for chores. We make the mistake of equating time equally, but it is decidedly not equal.
One surefire way to burnout is doing too many low-value tasks and not enough high-value ones. I know, for instance, that writing and resting are high-value tasks for me. Writing makes me money. Reading helps me recover.
Everything else in my business is secondary to those two tasks.
One of the best ways to reclaim your time is to stop splitting it between many different projects. Nearly every writer I know wants to write everything, everywhere, all at once, but if you want to leverage your time, it behooves you to push on one pressure point until you burst through the other side.
The simple fact is that multi-tasking takes more energy than single-tasking and has compounding negative effects. Suddenly, because your attention is elsewhere, simple tasks take longer than they should, throwing off your daily schedule and stressing you out because you fall behind.
When you fully focus on a single task, however, you feel less stress and can even enjoy your work. Multi-tasking takes more energy than doing one task because of context switching. Just like how it takes more gas to start a car than to keep it running, starting up new activities costs more energy than doing one single task.
This focus extends beyond your daily schedule, too. The more focus you can put into any one area of your business, the more progress you will make on it.
When we focus our attention on one problem, everything we do amplifies each other. Otherwise, you will likely disburse your effort to such a degree that it will be hard to get anywhere.
I recommend always being underleveraged with your time and energy while trying to make every action you take increase the leverage you have in your business. This is how we protect our energy and make sure we always have a reserve of energy that builds over time.
Have you ever heard of a “profit first” mentality?
It’s the idea that you take 10% off the top of your revenue for profit, and then you work with the remaining 90%.
I think we need an “energy first” mentality, which means before we take on any project, we figure out how to retain 10% of our energy as “profit”, so we always have some in the bank, investing and growing for us.
I am as bad at this as anyone (on both the profit and energy fronts). I was just about to go on sabbatical for a year, and instead, I started a company that took all my energy.
I thought that year was going to be about restoration, and it instead became about transformation.
I’m not complaining.
I have done so much, both physically and mentally, that changed me for the better and brought me to levels I’ve been struggling to get to for years. I’ve never eclipsed $150,000 in revenue until 2022, and in 2023, we more than doubled that number.
That’s in no small part thanks to your support.
However, in 2026, I want to recover and make sure I always keep 10% of my energy just for me, so I’m building up a bank that will never run dry again.
Thinking, “Will I be able to run an energy profit after taking it on?” seems like a good enough place to start, as any.
You can use this “energy first” mindset to analyze what you can do with ease and then tack your expectations to that.
One of the things that changed my outlook on running a creative business was transitioning from overleveraging myself to being underleveraged, leaving huge gaps in my day for just thinking. This time allows me to find my most highly leveraged activities and double down on them.
Now, when something comes along that’s a “heck yes”, I have time for it. Meanwhile, my income hasn’t dipped because I have successively found more leveraged activities that continuously allow me to do more in less time.
Humans are very good at filling our time with things that “might be fun” or “could be interesting”, and then when something comes along that’s a “heck yes!” they don’t have the available time to do it.
Why do we do that? It turns out that humans are also very bad at projecting how they will feel in the future, which leads us to be mean to our future selves.
We are told to do all the things, but doing almost none of the things is way better until they resonate deeply. This mentality has gotten me further than doing all the things ever has.
What do you think?
How can you use technology to help you get more done in less time?
What would you do with reclaimed time?
Let us know in the comments.
