Freeing Up Time by Automating with Guest Ari Meisel: MakingBank S1E33

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Summary

How much of your life could you optimize, outsource, or automate?

Every day, hundreds of millions of people spend time doing things we really don’t want to be doing—posting, emailing, sharing, shopping, editing, researching…it’s all busy-work that stops us from using our real, creative talents.

That’s why we’re sitting down with Ari Meisel—founder of Less Doing, More Living—a company that specializes in helping busy entrepreneurs and business minds free up time for the things that really matter through the power of optimization, automation, and outsourcing.

Does it work?—you betcha. Since starting my work with Ari, I’ve already eliminated more than 15 hours from my work week.

Listen to hear Ari talk in-detail about:

●       Building a business while working only 1 hour a week

●       How to optimize, outsource, and automate everything in your life

●       How he cut his podcast production time from 15 hours to 1 hour of work

●       Why his current work week is 9:30 to 2:30, two days a week

●       Why everybody should work with a virtual assistant at some point

●       Ari’s top tips for optimizing productivity

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Transcription

Hi, I’m Josh Felber and you’re watching Making Bank,  where we uncover the success strategies of the 1% to help you build the  business that you want as well as create and live the lifestyle so you have  the time and the freedom to spend with the people that you love. Welcome to  the show today. This is going to be an awesome show is what we’re really  going to dive into today and what we’re really going to focus on is how you  can create more efficiency in your life, how you can become a better you by  automating many things that you have in your life.

For myself, most everything that I have in my businesses  when it comes to online marketing, when it comes to building my brand, my  podcasts, my video show here with Making Bank, 90% of the stuff I’ve always  done myself and it creates a huge time capture that it requires of myself.  Whether it’s editing certain things, whether it’s posting to social media,  whether it’s uploading the videos to YouTube, to my blog, whatever that may  be, it requires a lot of time and a lot of attention.

I thought, “Man, one day, how can I do better? How  can I eliminate the hour? Is there any ways that I’m able to automate this  process so I don’t have to upload that video or maybe I don’t have to upload  it to the transcription service. I really started to dig into that and try to  figure out how can I do this? How can I eliminate those hours per week and  free up that time so I can focus on other areas of my life, focus on more  time with my family, whatever that may be.

I found a great opportunity and I was able to connect  with someone to be able to start to lead me down that path towards success.  What it revolves around is less doing is more living. Less doing is more  living. I’m not saying, “Stop doing everything so you can live  more,” but if there’s certain things that you can automate, why not do  that? I’ll give you an example. I wanted to automate my whole video process,  so I shoot my video, I do my interviews and then it gets edited from my  editing team, but then how does it get online from there?

How does it get to my blog from there? How does it get  post to social media from there? That requires all my time, all my attention  and everything to make that happen. I said, “My challenge was I want to  create a better way and a process where the majority of it is all automated.”  I utilized this less doing more living concept, which has allowed me to do  that. The coolest thing is is we’re actually starting to test this right now  and it’s seen huge success, where this is going to eliminate on average for  me, anywhere from ten to about fifteen hours a week.

That ten to fifteen hours that I’m freeing up for myself  then is going to allow me to work more on my business, continue to connect  and interview more and more people out there, to continue to share more  content with you on a daily basis and create more value. This is also going  to free up some extra time so I can get out and connect to spend more time  with my wife and my kids and do some more fun things like that as well. How  we went all about this was we took a lot of different online processes, so  the process of utilizing Dropbox.

Dropbox is an online Cloud storage, so if you’ve never  utilized it, it’s unbelievable and will be a great savior for you. We went to  Dropbox and were able to put my video right in Dropbox. Well then this  triggers a response where that uploads right to my YouTube account. That  whole process then is transcribed and that transcription is then put back in  another separate folder in Dropbox without me doing anything before. I mean  that alone right there would chop off probably a couple hours. Then from  there, once it’s all transcribed, the video is there, then it needs to get to  my blog.

There has to be some different video editing notations,  things like that done and that’s about the process and it requires about 10%  of the manual labor, as I like to call it. We’ve been able to automate about  90% of the process and that leaves only 10% of manual labor. That is huge.  That is a huge piece of time savings for myself and then that 10%, if maybe I  can outsource it to somebody like a virtual assistant, that may be something  I just do myself, but through that whole process, now I’ve freed up my time  as well as created more hours in my week to work more on my business.

Ask yourself this, “What do you have out there that  could be automated?” “What do you do on a daily basis that could be  automated?” Have you ever experienced maybe a cell phone bill or a cable  bill and the information was just not correct and you just dreaded picking up  the phone, calling customer service, because you knew you were going to sit  on hold, you knew then you had to wait, then you had to argue with the person  to try to get your bill corrected? I mean, how much time is that? An hour  maybe more? Just depending how long you’ve sat on hold.

I know I’ve called in and have sat on hold probably  forty-five minutes to an hour sometimes just before I got to somebody. Then  you couldn’t even speak to that person, you had to go talk to somebody else.  There’s a whole another service out there that allows you to give them the  information. They call in, they haggle with them, they get it and they get  your bill corrected. It doesn’t even cost you a penny. How is that for an  automation and service?

I’m really excited today to bring in the guru of less  doing, more living with his book here, Arti Misel, and I hope you stick  around so you can learn what you can do to automate, create more efficiency  in your life so you can start living your life. Stick around after this  break. I am Josh Felber and you’re watching Making Bank. Get out and be  extraordinary. You’re watching Making Bank. I am Josh Felber and we have an  awesome show for today. We have special guest Ari Miesel, who is a loving  husband with his wonderful wife, Anna, and they have three little boys.

He’s a family man, like myself, foremost. As well, he’s  a author, speaker and coach and creator of Less Doing More Living, an  effective set of practices and principles designed to help overcome and help  you become more efficient in your business and in your life. He’s a native  from New York and he studied at Penn. When Ari began his successful career in  real estate development and in 2006, it took him on an unexpected course with  a life-changing event. Ari, welcome to Making Bank.

Ari: Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me.

Josh: Awesome. Tell us a little bit about … You had this  life-changing event. You were on the track for success and just your whole  life got turned upside down. Can you give us a little insight to what  happened?

Ari: Yeah, so I mean I was working in real estate development  in construction. I was living a pretty unhealthy lifestyle, I’d say, but  working a lot of hours. I was really stressed out and I was not eating  particularly well. I was drinking, I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day  and-

Josh: Sure.

Ari: I, yeah, basically my body broke-

Josh: Yeah.

Ari: When I was 23, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease-

Josh: Oh, wow.

Ari: Which for those that don’t know is a chronic  inflammatory condition. It effects the digestive tract, it’s very painful and  considered to be incurable. After being put on a lot of meds and getting  sicker and sicker, I had this particularly low point in the hospital where I  ended up turning things around and after I think four or five months, I was  off my meds entirely and-

Josh: Wow.

Ari: Ran my first triathlon shortly thereafter.

Josh: That’s phenomenal. I’ve known a few people that have had  Crohn’s and it is horrible. What did you do? Obviously, you were on a track  for an unhealthy lifestyle. What did you do to really make that  transformation and start to really get your body healing?

Ari: We … I’m sorry, I ended up looking at a lot of the  data that I had, which was a lot of blood tests and then I ended up doing a  lot of other tests on myself. That was first of all kind of empowering,  because when you’re in a situation where you’re basically at war with your  own body, it’s pretty tough.

Josh: Sure.

Ari: On a number of levels. I did a lot of experimentation  with different diets and different supplements, but basically what I settled  on, which I now … I’ve replicated my results and several other Crohn’s  patients and it’s really a high fat, low sugar diet.

Josh: Okay.

Ari: A couple sort of basic supplements, but the main thing  that I ended up coming to the realization was that the biggest issue was  stress.

Josh: Stress, okay.

Ari: Stress is a documented inflammatory agent and in some  people that can cause bad sleep, in some people it can cause obesity, in some  people it can cause something like Crohn’s. Basically, it was a confluence of  suddenly being in the situation where I could only work about an hour a day  because I’m so sick and also the stress aspect basically that helped me  create this completely new system of productivity called Less Doing, which I  help people optimize, automate and outsource everything in our lives,  including our health to be more effective. Being more productive kind of-

Josh: Sure.

Ari: Changed my life.

Josh: You say you changed your diet, obviously nutrition and  everything else and then so your focus then was that high fat, no sugars,  really focused on like proteins, good fats and that sort of thing?

Ari: Exactly, yeah. Low sugar is big one because sugar is  inflammatory-

Josh: Right.

Ari: It wreaks havoc on your gut bacteria and then the high  fat is really important, because the good fats like avocado oil, olive oil,  coconut oil, [pasteurized 00:11:30] beef, that kind of stuff, it helps your  gut bacteria communicate better. It’s anti-inflammatory and yeah, I mean it’s  just something that’s not … It’s basically been demonized over the last  forty years and the standard American diet is-

Josh: Sure.

Ari: Everything is low fat now and that’s just the opposite  of what we want. We need those good fats.

Josh: No and definitely that’s really cool. I mean for myself  I always kind of ate on a paleo focus, even over the last several years have  increased my fat levels to focus on a lot more fats, more ketogenic type focus.  I don’t know if that’s kind of the path that your diet is on?

Ari: I’m not, I wouldn’t technically be considered ketogenic-

Josh: Okay.

Ari: Because I’m not really low carb and I’m not gluten free.

Josh: Okay.

Ari: The problem with paleo and keto is funny because with  paleo a lot of times they end up eating so much protein that it’s like  impossible to get-

Josh: Sure.

Ari: Into ketogenesis basically. Like [bacon 00:12:28] or  [inaudible 00:12:27]. I mean sure, so I my diet is not ketogenic.

Josh: Yeah.

Ari: I have been in ketosis and there’s definitely benefits,  there’s definitely downsides as well-

Josh: Sure.

Ari: Some people just process carbs better. I happen to  process carbs very well, which you can figure out from blood tests. All that  to say, but yeah I mean, keto is great if you can do it, but there’s some  other issues there, so this is just more about providing those good fats and  low sugar, so it’s not specifically-

Josh: Right.

Ari: It’s not specifically low carb.

Josh: You know I think that’s really awesome. I think so many  times we get hung up on, “Oh, this is the new diet and that’s kind of  that fad.” We really got to find out what works best for our bodies as  you did through blood tests and things like that to really optimize and allow  ourselves to reduce that inflammation and then also a good path for nutrition  to help us stay strong and healthy.

Ari: Exactly.

Josh: Cool, man. Well so tell me a little bit more about this  Less Doing More Living. I mean I’m really excited about that.

Ari: Yeah, well, so as I said, I basically … The overall  framework is that I teach people how to optimize, automate and outsource  everything in their lives.

Josh: Sure.

Ari: That’s a very important order. This applies to everything  that we do, but a lot of people tend to try to outsource something first  because it’s really easy to just tell someone else, “Hey, you do  this.”

Josh: Right.

Ari: The problem with that is that it’s basically like  sweeping the dirt under the rug. You end up not actually making the problem  more efficient and in some ways you can make it worse because you actually  distanced yourself from the ability to improve the process. It’s really  important to optimize first. Optimization, we’re really talking about  tracking to some extent an awareness-

Josh: Okay.

Ari: We’re looking at the processes that are going through on  a regular basis and identifying the steps involved and then right away you  can start to begin to see efficiencies and usually because we have this  autopilot mode where we tend to just go through our daily processes or  whatever they might be any time and that means that we don’t actually look at  how we can make it better. The second part is to automate and automation is  like my playground right now because there’s so many things that we can  automate now that even three months ago a person had to do.

Josh: Sure.

Ari: There’s things like IFTTT and [inaudible 00:14:56] I can  talk about if you like and then once you do that, if there’s anything left  over, that’s the first time you ever look at outsourcing it to a specialist  or generalist, whether that’s a virtual assistant or a graphic designer or an  architect or whatever it might be.

Josh: Cool, really awesome. Can you stick around for a couple  more minutes? I just have to take a quick break.

Ari: Absolutely.

Josh: Awesome. I am Josh Felber. You are watching Making Bank  and we’ll be right back. Welcome back. I am Josh Felber and you’re watching  Making Bank and we left off as Ari Miesel was just explaining to us how you  can become more efficient in your life, less doing more living and he has an  awesome book out. If you’ve not read it yet, he has lots of cool tips, tricks  and different ways you can then optimize your life so you can start living  your live more fully. Welcome back, Ari.

Ari: Thanks, it’s good to be back.

Josh: Well, cool. You’ve talking a little bit about  outsourcing. Okay, so first of all, we have to help streamline things in our  life. I know you mentioned a couple hacks like the IFTTT, I think there’s  another one called [inaudible 00:16:25], yeah. How do you specifically use  those to make your life a little easier?

Ari: Well, so IFTTT and [inaudible 00:16:35] is a little bit  more complex, but really not that complex. IFTTT is dead simple. You really  are just setting up triggers and actions-

Josh: Okay.

Ari: It’s the kind of things that you’re using every day. You  look at … What you should do is people should go to IFTTT and they should  click on channels, which is all the different apps that it works with like  Twitter or-

Josh: Okay.

Ari: LinkedIn or [Yam 00:17:19] or whatever. You think to  yourself, “Well, I use that,” and then you click on it. It will say  like these are the triggers and these are the actions, so it’s if this, then  that. You can do very, very basic things like if I change my profile picture  on Twitter, it also changes my Facebook, which sounds trivial, but it’s the  kind of thing that takes you forty-five to sixty seconds to do and you’re  doing those hundreds of times a day. Now you can stream those processes  together and build very, very complex processes, so my entire podcast  production process has basically been automated through this.

Josh: Oh, wow.

Ari: Whereas it used to take fifteen hours to do an episode  and I was doing everything myself. Now it takes me an hour of the good stuff,  which is reporting the actual content-

Josh: Right.

Ari: Then everything else happens automatically from the  audio engineering to the show notes to posting it on the website, everything.

Josh: That’s phenomenal. Tell us a little bit more on that  because I know that we have a lot of people that listen that some people have  podcasts, some people have other shows and things as well.

Ari: Well, it’s easier to show it visually, but I can sort of  explain. Basically the way my podcast works for people that haven’t heard it  is I have a thirty minute … Or the first half is basically me talking about  cool links of the week.

Josh: Okay.

Ari: The second half is an interview with some sort of  expert. Basically, I just have to record those two files and they can happen  days apart or weeks apart and save those into a Dropbox and then everything  else happens from there. It basically says, “Okay, there’s a new file in  Dropbox-

Josh: Right.

Ari: “That’s the if, and then the that is well then that  goes to the graphic designer.” When that’s done then it’s like, okay,  now the two files automatically get sent to the audio engineer and he puts  them together and then he puts them back in Dropbox, which then goes to the  show notes writer and then he puts the show notes into [Ever Note 00:18:44],  which then triggers something else, so-

Josh: Wow.

Ari: There’s just multiple triggers along the way and then it  goes into [Lips In 00:18:46] and then it goes onto iTunes obviously-

Josh: Right.

Ari: Then it goes to the blog, then it gets posted on all the  social media sites. Actually for anybody listening who has a podcast and has  a WordPress blog also there’s a really great plug in. You might like this,  too, Josh-

Josh: Sure.

Ari: It’s called Simple Podcast Press.

Josh: Okay.

Ari: It’s really great. What it does is you hook in your  iTunes feed to it-

Josh: Yeah.

Ari: Anytime you post a new episode, it creates the  associated blog post for you-

Josh: Oh, wow.

Ari: Including time stamped show notes with links to the  exact point in the audio where the time stamp is-

Josh: Sure.

Ari: Sign up to your newsletter, subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher  or Sound Cloud, all that stuff. It’s all done automatically. It’s really  cool.

Josh: No, that’s awesome because it does take time. I’ve been  there myself and it’s just … You could be better of spent doing something  else, spend it with the family, that sort of thing.

Ari: Exactly.

Josh: I just happened to read a … Come across a blog post  the other day, Ari. It talked about working two days a week. Since we have a  lot of entrepreneurs here that watch this show, I’d love to hear more thoughts  on that.

Ari: Sure, so first of all, I just want to be clear with  something with people, I don’t want people to necessarily work two days a  week, but I do want them to just understand that it’s possible. In fact,  working an hour a day was a reality in my life for quite a while. The two day  thing for me actually started in college. I graduated a year early and to do  that I had to take a bunch of extra classes and I started looking for classes  that basically just fit a time slot, which is how I ended up with a Minor in  Psychology and a Minor in Art History, but I was taking classes two days a  week.

It was Tuesdays and Thursdays and it was really great  because I got into a groove. It was nine hour days basically, but it was  really intense and good and I worked my butt off and then I had a day in  between and then I had a four day weekend every week-

Josh: Nice.

Ari: Which was amazing. For me, my current work week is  Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:30 to 2:30, and what that means is that I’m  able to drop off and pick up my kids from school every single day-

Josh: Awesome.

Ari: Which is a priority for me and I’m able to get very,  very focused work done in that time. Now to be clear, that is the time that  I’m working in the business. I am always working on the business. I love what  I do and I live what I do, so by putting myself in that situation with my  family and my life, it actually helps me create situations where I need to  figure out new ways of being productive and test things out and then I can pour  that back into my work. It also means that during those periods, those  Mondays and Wednesdays, I am on fire basically. I don’t eat, I just go, go,  go and I really-

Josh: Right.

Ari: Be like, “Wow.”

Josh: No and that’s really cool, I think. I’ve been able to do  the same things, where I’ve said it’s about 9:30, mine is until about 3:30  and then you just … In that time frame, it’s just you’re rocking stuff out  and you’re focused and you’re really working on the business knocking stuff  out non-stop and it is utilizing efficiency techniques and stuff that you do  talk about. One thing I’d like to do is maybe what are your three top tips  that you can leave with our listeners that they can take out and start  implementing today to create more efficiency in their life?

Ari: One is actually … This might sound counter to what I  said before, but I think everybody at some point should work with a virtual  assistant-

Josh: Sure.

Ari: Whether they have an assistant or not. I think it’s an  educational process for you in terms of how you effectively communicate and  delegate your needs. If you’re dealing with somebody who doesn’t know how to  do what you want them to do-

Josh: Right.

Ari: And doesn’t have any training, that’s a really cool  parameter, in my opinion, in terms of how you get better at communicating  what you need done.

Josh: Right.

Ari: Now, so that’s one. A second one is to start tracking  something. Track how you’re spending your time or how many steps you’ve  taken, how much food you eat, like all these things. A lot of these things  can be done very easily, but whether or not you do something with that  information, it’s okay. Just tracking it is powerful in itself because you’re  starting to take an active role in bringing your awareness back to what’s  happening in your life, how you’re spending your time, your energy, your  money and your resources.

Josh: Sure.

Ari: The third one is to create some sort of an external  brain. Someplace where you can just dump all your thoughts, all your ideas.  In my experience, Ever Note is really the best tool for that. If you want to  use pen and paper, that’s fine, but just don’t judge, don’t hesitate, don’t  think about it too much, just get them out of your head because ideas need  flow.

Josh: Virtual assistant, tracking things in your life and  being able to do brain dump your information into either pen and paper type  format or into electronic digital format.

Ari: Yes.

Josh: Awesome and that’s a huge thing. That was one of the  hardest things for me is being able to take that information and get it down  on paper or in something, because you do, you start to limit and you start to  really think instead of just letting yourself flow and put that information  down.

Ari: Right, that’s right.

Josh: What’s one piece of technology that you couldn’t live  without right now?

Ari: Probably my phone. I mean I basically run my whole life  and my business from my phone. I’m rarely on the computer. I mean I’m on it  right now, but I’m basically … I don’t touch my laptop more than those two  days a week essentially, so everything-

Josh: Sure.

Ari: Is really optimized, being able to be done from my phone  so that mostly, so that even if I have like three minutes while I’m going to  the bathroom to do something, I can get something effective done.

Josh: Nice. Awesome. Well I really appreciate your time today  coming on Making Bank. It was such an honor to be able to have you and share  your information with our audience.

Ari: Well thank you for having me.

Josh: Definitely. I am Josh Felber. You’re watching Making  Bank. Thanks for coming today and get out and be extraordinary.