Boosting Productivity and Planning with Demir Bentley

0:00
It's interesting, when you lose time, it's so easy to measure it, isn't it? When you worked 50 hours instead of 40, it's really easy to see that extra 10 hours. But when you're drained of energy, you don't get a really clear measurement of it. You just know that You come home at the end of the day. It's five o'clock. You've got plenty of time to do stuff, but you just don't feel like doing it. You just don't have the energy. And that's when you know that you've been burning cognitive load too fast. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm super excited to be bringing on this guest today. His name is Demir and actually hits a husband and wife team who own Lifehack Method. I actually was introduced to Carrie, the wife. Today's interview is just going to be with Demir and I'm super excited to have these deep conversations with him all about productivity, planning your week and all the different things that are happening. And the chaos that's coming into this new year and making sure that we are set up for success. I actually met Kerry through a mastermind group for my firm. So at Magnetic Profits and me and Kerry just hit it off immediately, mostly because we're just productivity nerds. And we could just nerd out all day, every day. We stayed connected throughout the year of being in this mastermind together. Then eventually they signed on to work with my firm and they have been such amazing clients. And it's been such a fun experience seeing them grow and just seeing the things that they do. And They have like, I think you guys have a New York time bestseller book, correct? If I remember, it's a wall street journal. And, what's the other one? Wall street journal and another bestselling list. Yeah. I love that. I just remember like just chatting with her about it. I'm like, this is so cool. So I love everything that you guys do. So welcome to the show. Demir, feel free to introduce yourself and then we'll kind of take it from there. Hey, thank you for asking us to do this. So my name is Damir. My wife, Carrie and I run a company called the life hack method, where we show people how to get organized and productive so that they can live happier than a billionaire. It's our stated mission. And we're just super passionate about showing people that. Often the things that they're looking for in their life, like more time with their kids or more time to focus on their health, really can sit on the other side of doing some of the boring work of just getting more organized and more productive. if we have a claim to fame, it's mostly that we have an approach that's really focused on being super simple. life is chaotic and complicated enough. I think your productivity system needs to be just that. Dead simple, so easy, so simple to go to that you're just going to it again and again. And so we tend to be known for two things. One is just a really simple and easy to use productivity system. And the second is a relentless focus on lifestyle. So inside of our Lifehack tribe, we call ourselves freedom warriors, not productivity warriors, because ultimately the productivity is dead. It's really just a vehicle to create freedom in our lives. And I guess as a way, since I'm doing my own intro here, it's a little bit awkward, but we've worked with a lot of amazing people like companies like Google and Levi's and Microsoft and, , Executives from Accenture. And, you know, you can imagine all of those big names and, ultimately we're just here for people who sit behind laptops, who are in charge of organizing their time to show them how to do knowledge work better and get their life back as a result. Yes, I love that. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I know today's conversation is going to be great. So before we hit record to kind of loop everyone in me and Damir, we're like talking about, Ooh, what should we talk about today? Because we can sit here all day, every day talking about systems and nerding out over this. Everyone listening knows I am a huge productivity and systems nerd, so it can go so many different directions, but something that we thought would be a really great conversation. is talking about the seasonality of bookkeepers and accountants because as this episode is airing, it's going to be the very beginning of 2025. As we all know, we'll be in heavy cleanup season. We'll be in heavy 1099 season, especially in January. Then we're going to go straight into tax season. And I am really huge. My birthday is actually, I don't know if you know this, Damir, my birthday is actually the day after tax day. So I said, I was like, Yeah, I always say that I was like born for this space because like I get to go through these crazy months and then like the day after I'm like, bye, going to celebrate, you know? I love it. You know, one of the things we do every year, our most popular call that we run annually is our annual pre planning session. So to take a step back, you know, we wrote the book winning the week, and it was a really simple premise. The simple premise is that you need to plan your week to win your week. And 99 percent of people would just say, duh, of course. Of course you need to plan your week. In fact, we did a survey of 5, 000 people and we asked, it was 5, 000 people who managed between five and 50 people. So not just any random person, but people who are really successful making more than a hundred thousand dollars in managing between five and 50 people. We asked them like, what's the most important productivity technique that helps you win your week? 94 percent said that planning your week ahead of time was key to when you're weak. So again, Big duh, right? Everybody knows this. Here's where it gets interesting. We followed up with those people and we said, okay, of the people who thought should be winning your week, how many people had been doing it in the last four weeks? And we asked this question to try to suss out, is it possible that there's something we know that we should be doing, but we're actually not doing sort of like everybody knows what it takes to eat healthy. That doesn't mean we do it on a weekly basis. And do you want to take a guess at the percentage of people of those 94 percent who said that planning was the number one thing that you need to do to win your week? What percentage do you think had done it in the prior four weeks? I bet it was like 7 percent or some like really low amount. It was less than a 1%. It wasn't even a full rounded up to 1 percent number. So this gets to the bottom of a weird truth about planning your week, planning your month, planning your year is that it is something that we all know that we should be doing, but it is also something at the same time that none of us do. So it's this weird sort of open secret that we need to plan and yet we don't. And that doesn't just go for the week. It goes for the year. So coming back to this idea of. leaning into your seasonality as a bookkeeper. There's such dramatic and intense seasonality built into your life as a bookkeeper. And we know it, it's so obvious. It's like slap your forehead obvious, but I cannot tell you how many of my clients who are bookkeepers would finish tax season and then go right into something super intense and incredibly involved. And I'm sitting there looking at it from the outside, like. This is a bad time for you to be doing this. You should be scheduling a vacation or, you know, a staycation at least, you know, why are you taking yourself from the flame right into the fire again? And it's just interesting how this could be something that we all sort of know, but we're not really taking positive action on. So, yeah, I guess I'm just offering that as a share back. certainly the. Tactical thing we should be doing is really looking at our calendar for the year and saying, you know, to what degree can we really engineer and build in some kind of breaks that that period where we know the nature of our work is intense. The pendulum swings in very intense ways. So if it's going to swing a lot to the busy work side, it's got to swing back to the. Relaxation side. And even if you can't step away completely from your business, I'd recommend that you schedule some BAM weeks or even a BAM month BAM stands for bare ass minimum. Right. And so sometimes when Carrie and I, you know, we've been working intensely, we'll schedule a BAM month and we've still got to be around. We've still got to do things for our business, but we've sort of got this intention of we're doing the bare ass minimum here because we need to recapture a degree of relaxation and restoration. I love that so much. I am like a huge proponent here at Workflow Queen. Like the whole goal of the company is to get people to bookkeepers accounts specifically to a place where they are removed from the day to day so they don't have to be there. What we like to call work optional or removable CEO. And that is like one of my biggest, biggest, like end all be all things I want people to experience with working with us and whether that's the programs or the ways that we work with people. And I think that this just goes to show and just really restates kind of what I've been like hammering on people for so long, which is you need a break and you can't always go up. I know that we all experienced this during like 2020 when a lot of like the online space really blew up and there was like just a lot of revenue to be had. There was a lot of people spending, you know, PPP loans and all these different things and these resources given by the U S and just so much money was floating around. But then like a lot of people realize like, Oh my gosh, like we're not always going to be in this upstate. And like you said, there's always a yin to a yang. There's always a uptick in like doing and then there also needs to be a rest phase. But one of the things I kind of wanted to focus on was, when you were talking about taking the break and like relaxing and giving yourself the unplugged vacation, I love that idea. And I'd love to like dive into some ideas or ways that you think, I think you said they're The BAM months or BAM weeks, I think you call them. but you talked about, like, for me, one of the big things that I like to kind of teach , and essentially have people have more awareness around is, like you said, people are, they know the idea of planning, they know the idea of needing systems, they know the idea of, like, eating healthy, like, but it's a lot harder said than done a lot of the times. But one of the big things is, Reassessing how the prior season went. So I see this a lot and I'm sure you see this as well where people have this uptick in the type of business that they run. So we'll use bookkeepers and accountants specifically will they'll run through tax season. They're so freaking busy. They can't breathe, which is fine. They get out of it when they get out of it. They take this rest and then they get right back into another busy season or a busy thing or the next big project. But a lot of time, there's no, Yeah. There's, there's no looking back and saying, what did we, what did we learn from that? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's like one big thing. I always say like during tax season, we have this document that on our team, that's like bookmark on my Chrome bar, it's bookmarked on my team's Chrome bar. We use notion. And so essentially what we do is throughout tax season, all the things that are going wrong, all the things that are going right, things that we might wish we had automated or things that we We could fix. We just jot down. We don't take any action during that busy season, but once we've kind of like regrouped, we've given ourselves like the team, like maybe two weeks of just chill out, just do the bare minimum. Like you were saying, we actually go back collectively as a team and we review that document to say we didn't have time to fix these problems, but let's reassess this. So I'm curious if you have any hacks for that kind of stuff. As far as like with the reassessment of it. Current busy seasons. Well, there's two levels to this. One is I call this an MIB report and MIB stands for make it better. And we will be feeding into our MIB report, which for us is just a Google doc, usually before, during, and after. So for example, we just had our big annual pre planning call for our tribe. We had over 300 people live and another sometimes 600 people are rewatching it on the replay. And so as we're going into it and I'm working on it, I'm already having ideas that are not really ready to be implemented this year. But I know I'm going to want to implement next year. So even before I do the annual planning, I'm already starting to come up with ideas for how this process could be better next year. Then when I'm doing it right after I'm done, which is tough because I'm exhausted. Sometimes it's, it's an all day event. So it's six hours that I'm doing live coaching. I really just want to sign off, but what I'll do is just scrape the cream right off the top of the batch and just say, okay, what are just two or three things that Are hitting me right now as I finish this call that I know I could have done better or I know I could have improved and then I'll do what you said a little bit of a break and I'll come back with some perspective maybe after a couple days or a week and get together with my team and say, okay, what do we think we can do better? On this. And so I think an MIB report can can be a sort of almost continuing resource that you can go to. And every single year, I think to myself, Oh, I don't need to write this down. I'll remember it next year. And I promise you every time I come back to it the following year. I'm reading it as if somebody else wrote it. I definitely would not have remembered this stuff. And it is so helpful when I come back around the next year to start preparing for my annual planning to have this breadcrumb trail that I left for myself of, Oh wow, these are really great ideas for how to improve. Yeah, I love that. I love that you said that you're going to forget it because I trust myself way too much sometimes. I don't know if you're like this either, but like, I swear, I think I'm always going to remember everything. And I'm, I lied to myself every day thinking I'm actually going to, and it's been really helpful. Like, it's so funny that we all have different like ways that we do things, but they're all, the concepts are all remain the same. And it's like, one of the things that we do Whenever we're onboarding a new client at my firm or whenever we are doing cleanups for our clients, whatever we're doing with them throughout the process, even after sales calls, actually, we kind of do the same thing, but it's not necessarily the same as far as like. Reassessing what went right or what went wrong. Instead, it's like let's just say I get off of a call with, I did this after I getting off the call with Carrie, like talking with you guys with working with the firm. I literally got off because I knew I'd forget all the little details. I wrote some notes, but sometimes there's those little nuggets you guys give me along the way, maybe you're talking about goals or whatever. I just film myself on loom just talking out loud and just saying like whatever could come up for me. And then all of a sudden I remember little other pieces that she said. And I also put down little ideas of how we can like fix things for them and customize it if they signed on. And that's been really helpful for our team. It like could be used in so many different ways because now. The onboarding specialist would go in and watch that video and they can get like an infused excitement from my voice the little the golden nuggets I picked up along the way talking to you guys, stuff like that and so it can be used in so many different ways and I'm assuming that's something that you guys do as well. Absolutely. You know, the other thing is, I'll just give out our formula for planning the year because I know this is going to come out and there's going to be some people who haven't planned their year and a lot of times people will, they'll sort of round the bases, but not hit second base, if that makes sense, right? So to score the point. In baseball, you don't just need to run all the bases. You need to make sure that you touch on each base. And sometimes I'll see with planning. That's we tend to run around and touch on the bases that we like. So we, we tend to have these and it's different for everybody, but there's certain things that people like doing more than other things. But when you skip those steps, you really deny yourself that full power. Of the planning working for you. So in annual planning, and I'll just write all this off. Somebody can come back and re listen to it if they really want to write it down. The first thing we do is we read last year's annual plan, if you did one, and we do a recap on like, what's our first impression? Like skimming that cream off the top. What's our First impression of how we did last year against our plan. And even if you didn't write down a plan last year, you can still skim off. Like, what's my impressions of how we did last year. What's coming up for me. Usually like a paragraph or two, nothing fancy. Then we'll go into a section where we say, let's list out all of our business wins and business losses and personal wins and personal losses. And not only do we list them out and celebrate them, think about what you deny yourself when you don't recognize the wins that you had, I cannot. Tell you how many clients I have who, when I run this process for them, Alyssa, they will start to get blown away with all the wins that they had that they sort of erased. In their brain. I love that. Erased it. It's like it didn't happen. And so now they're getting all of this strong infusion of positive emotion where they're like, actually, I'm feeling like I was a loser, but really I'm looking at this list of things I did. And I won big last year. How, how could that be possible? And it's our tendency to overly focus on the negative at the expense of the positive. And when they, what we do is we have them derive some lessons. What did I learn that I can, if I'm, if I did something right. What did I learn for that so that I can keep doing that right in the future? If something worked for me, the height of idiocy or craziness would be not doing that. Let's double down on our wins. And if, if we did suffer some losses, how can we learn from those? And so this is a big base that people don't touch off on a lot, Alyssa, is that they tend to sort of have a really crazy, chaotic year. And they want to just bury it almost like a, it's like a murder mystery where it's like, yeah, let's bury it in the, in the woods and hope that nobody sees it. No, we want to do a postmortem, bring it out into the light. Let's open it up. Let's figure out what happened. You're going to find that there was a lot more good than bad. I think this is why people don't do it is they think they're going to find a lot more bad than good. You're going to find a lot more good. Good than bad. So if number one is skim off those top line observations and number two is personal wins, personal losses, business wins, business losses. Then number three, we go into what do you want to start doing this year? What do you want to stop doing? And what do you want to keep doing? Right? So what's the new things you want to bring into your life? What are the old things that you want to cut out and just sort of toss away? Like bad habits, bad routines, you know, sometimes people or interactions that could be where you say, you know what? This client needs to go this year. I think this is the year they get to get cut off the roster. And what are things that continue to serve me that I want to make sure not to forget about? And keep doing. And so these are some really great exercises. We do a couple other things. We do a calendar review. We set big, leveraged goals for the year. So there's other things that we do, but I, I think when you're doing a postmortem on the year and getting yourself set up for an annual plan for the year, these are some of the bases that you want to touch off on to do a really great annual plan. I love that so much. And there's a couple of things that you kind of pointed on. We just did an annual planning for our group coaching program breakthrough. And so inside a breakthrough, it's like a, it's like a very intimate setting. We had like a probably, I would probably say we had like 75 to 80 of our students show up to that session because it's such a huge topic is getting ready for the year and making sure that you have everything done. But it's funny, one of the things that you said, I think it was number three, Was what do I want to stop doing what I want to add more of or maybe reduce? And that's so funny because there's something that I actually heard recently on a, I'm inside of like some sort of a mastermind and in the mastermind, the girl has like a private podcast and she talked about guidelines versus goals. Have you ever heard of that concept? Yeah, I love guidelines versus goals. So anybody who's listening, who doesn't know what guidelines versus goals is. So goals is like when you're striving towards, you know, a number maybe, or like, I want to get this thing done, or I want to have a podcast, or I'm going to write a book. Like those are all great things and great things to strive for. But essentially guidelines are the things that like, you're going to put in place and set in stone to say, If it doesn't serve this, this, this, these are like the rules, the guardrails, the things that I'm not willing to go beyond, the line in the sand, however you want to call it, we just call it guidelines. It actually helps to create that space. I'll give you a great example. in the bookkeeping and accounting space, a lot of people have this tendency to, um, feel really bad for their clients. So they tend to undercharge their clients. And so I always tell people like, instead of just having a goal of making a lot more money, can we just have better guidelines? Cause if you have better guidelines that stated, I'm only going to work with any client, as long as they hit X, Y, Z and the X, Y, Z could be, they hit a certain revenue range, there are certain personality type, or they have some sort of benefit for you. And so when you talked about that, I love that because my guidelines have helped to kind of guide. What I need to stop doing because at the end of the day, it's like, if I want to hit like these really big numbers within my business, I need to let go of and stop doing things like taking a crap ton of calls. I need to be limited on only taking a certain number of calls a week and whatever that might look like. So I love that you touched on that piece. Yeah, you know, this, this really gets to something that's been tickling me a lot. You know, I'm the planning guy. We wrote the book on it. It was a bestseller, you know, so that's sort of a thing that we've become really known for this idea of like, Oh, you go to Demir and Kerry for planning. One of the things that's really popped up for me that's been really curious is that I don't think that that word thinks what people. Think it means, right? You remember the princess bride. I don't think that the word things, it means what you think it means. So when a lot of times people tell me what they described to me, what the current planning process is, I'll say, Oh, are you planning? They say, Oh, of course I'm planning. And then they get in and they start describing it. I'm like, you're not actually planning. What you think planning is, is not actually what it is. So for most of us, we bring this to this over optimistic, over committing tendency. I call this magical thinking this idea. Oh yeah. You know, it's a big year. I'm going to do better than ever. I'm going to do everything. I'm going to do it all. And that's not planning. When you're planning. Planning is not some magical wand that you wave that somehow can fit 10 pounds of poop in a five pound bag. That's not planning. Planning is getting ultra realistic about what's really possible, finding your leverage points, and then making really tough decisions about what's gonna get done, and what's not gonna get done, where the resources are gonna go, and therefore, by extension, where the resources are not gonna go. So, planning is deciding. It's not some magic wand that's going to allow you to fit more into your gear than is reasonably possible. It's really deciding. Let's look at that word, decide. The root word, C I D, is decide. To murder, to kill, patricide, fratricide, homicide, right? So when we use the word side, it means to kill. And so when you're deciding, it means you are killing something off. And so you're not planning. If you don't have a little single tear running down your eye on a weekly or monthly or annual basis, when you plan, you have to take some of those precious little things that you swore that you were going to do and not do them. Right. That's making a decision. So I always like to tell my clients, you know, you've done a great planning session when you feel fantastic. And you know, that's the only way that you can really do it. And you've made all the tough calls, but there is still that single tier running down the side of your cheek because you had to let something you really wanted. Go that's planning. And I think, you know, people expect me to. Come out here and say, Oh no, you get to have it all, baby. You get to do it all. No, it's when you actually step into those big girl pants and you say, no, it's not going to all get done. And it's in the trying to get it all done that I'm going to. I'm going to put a bunch of balls on the 80 yard line, but I'm going to have no touchdowns. How many people do you know who do that in a year? They run a hundred balls to the 80 yard line and they don't get one single touchdown and you're exhausted and you're, sad and frustrated with yourself and you feel like what's wrong with me. When you see people scoring big touchdowns, it's because they consolidated their energy and effort behind a very few initiatives. Going back to what you said about Guidelines about standards. I'm not going to get it all done. This is where I'm operating. This is where I'm going to put my limited time and attention, and it's going to be leverage. We can talk about the concept of leverage if you want, but it's going to be that thing. That if I can get it done has a domino effect that happens behind it. If I get this one domino down, it's not just that domino. It'll start hitting other dominoes down it. I'll benefit from that this year, next year, the year after. So that's what great planning looks like. And that is not what most people are thinking. Thinking planning is most people approach planning with an energy of magical thinking. How do I get it all done? How do I sort of create this fictional document that makes me feel like somehow I'm gonna get it all done Even though I secretly know that's not gonna happen Interesting. Yeah, I do have, , I love that perspective. I was writing a couple of notes, even for myself as reminders. And one of the things I kind of wanted to touch on is when we're talking about planning and let's just say in the eyes of someone who owns a business, like specifically bookkeepers and accountants here, when someone's planning for their year ahead, let's just say that, would you say if you were coaching them one on one and you were having a conversation with them, if they were a solopreneur versus a team, Like, like they actually had a team. They had multiple people supporting them. Do you think it's more possible to hit more initiatives as you build the team? And as you have the more support, like, what's your perspective on that? You know, I have an interesting perspective, which is that I think that Carrie is a world class leader of our team. We're not big enough to necessarily call her a CEO, but she's certainly the principal, the leader of our company. And one of the interesting things she does is when we lose somebody, say, in customer service, instead of hastening to hire somebody else, Carrie will drop down into that role for two or three weeks and just do that role. There's no role in the company that's too important for Carrie to drop in and do herself. And what happens when she does that, is she finds all of these opportunities for optimization, where we may have gotten sloppy over the years, or when maybe somebody wasn't actually running the system the way that it was supposed to be run, or there's an opportunity to design a system that's even better. And she dropped into this customer service role recently, and realized that We were doing something that was costing us 10, 000 a year, just in lost revenues. And she created an opportunity for us to integrate some upsells that have since then been worth about 30, 000 a year. So Carrie dropped in for three weeks into a role and generated huge revenue profits and plug some holes that we had. And I say that simply to say that I think when you're a solopreneur, there's nobody better than you. To jump into a role and dial it in the way that it really should be. Nobody's going to care as much as you, nobody's going to have as much skin in the game and much incentive to create a system and a workflow that makes it as tight and as efficient as it possibly can. I really see about my solopreneurs as just being on a spectrum of if you can get it done. And make it so darn simple to do that you can actually start to bring somebody in or automate it even with technology. There's nobody better to do than you. So I still encourage a mindset with my solopreneurs of delegation. Even if you're the one that you're delegating to, because when we do it all ourselves, we can get a little bit sloppy. We can let a system get a little bit sloppy, a little bit uneven, a little bit messy because we think, Oh, it's just me doing this. But I think when you have a regard for yourself or over almost, even if you can't afford to outsource it right now. Almost pretending in your mind that you're going to delegate it to somebody, then you'll design a system that is as tight and as efficient as it possibly can. So yeah, even with solopreneurs, I'm looking for them to be bringing an attitude of, yeah, I'm both of those roles. I'm the CEO who's dropping down as the role and tightening it up and making it as efficient as possible. But then I'm also jumping over into the role of executor. I love that so much. And I love that you were kind of, really stepping into the conversation of having the business owner kind of stepping in and tightening things up. And even if you don't have a team to still always have that in mind, because even for myself, like you were talking some, sometime earlier in our conversation, you were talking about how. There's no way I think I'm going to trust myself that one year from now, I'm going to remember that process. So a great example of that, that what we're all going to experience going into January is what we call year end and year ends heavy. That means every one of our clients, we're having to make sure any of the last minute changes, anything that we need to do to get them tax ready. And a lot of the times, a lot of bookkeepers and accounts will tell me, well, it's just like month end. I'm like, it's actually not. There's a lot of different components that are different. So the reason I bring this up is sometimes like when you guys are doing anything in regards to even if you're by yourself, these documentations, these pieces of things, don't just serve for when you hire, they actually serve for yourself and your mental capacity. I can't imagine living in a world and in a business where I remembered everything off the top of my head. One, I would not be able to have the team that I do to be able to like help lead the way that I needed to. I would not have the mental space. So I love to kind of just chat a little bit on. what your guys's tips are as far as giving people, I know that might be productivity and systems, different techniques, but ways that you guys create more mental space for the leader, for the business owner that needs to be more productive for the business. 100%. I'm so glad you brought this up. You know, people make systems more than I think it needs to be. My favorite system. Hands down. The one I use the most is actually a system that I don't delegate. It's actually a system that I created for me and it's getting me and my kids out of the door. I've got a shared Apple note with my wife. That's just a bunch of checklist items that we need to check off to know That we got out the door in integrity with all the snacks and all the diapers and the backup. You know, if there's a blowout of a diaper, we need a change of clothes. Does the baby have milk? Do we have that backup supply of milk in case Carrie is a place where she can't pump or can't feed? Like, I mean, getting three kids and a dog and two adults out of the door, Just again, playing this fun game with you. Do you want to take a guess at how many like steps there are to get out of the door in integrity for me and my wife? Honestly, I would probably say like 25 to like 30. I only have a dog, so I can't imagine. And I know it's probably a lot. It's. 36 steps. There are so no wonder I'm getting out the door and experiencing so much anxiety and stress and I'm screwing things up and then we're having a tiny little micro fight because my wife saying, you know, why didn't you remember the sunscreen? We were going to the pool. How could you forget the sunscreen? And it's because there's 36 things to remember. Getting out the door. That's why I don't remember. It's a lot to remember. Even a high functioning person is going to either forget or experience a dramatic amount of cognitive load and stress. And so, you know, some of my best systems aren't systems that I have delegated to other people. They're actually systems that I give to myself to ease my cognitive load and facilitate these sort of everyday things that I do because I know I'm not going to remember. And yes, I go out the door three times a day. But because it's so many, I'm giving myself that, that's that boost that support. There's a book on this that if people love reading books, it's called the checklist manifesto. Have you read this? I have not actually, but I'm totally writing it down. You said the checklist manifesto. It's called the checklist manifesto. And he makes this simple observation that when the stakes are high, no matter how professional the. The person is they have a checklist so you know your heart surgeon, even if they've done a thousand heart surgeries has a checklist for prepping the operating room going through, they've got a checklist they run when they're opening you up before they close you up. They check to make sure they didn't leave anything inside you when the stakes are high. We have checklists and the checklist supports us in consistency, but it also supports us in easing our anxiety and cognitive load around doing something with high stakes a lot. And we can bring that principle into so much of our life. I just, you know, yeah, we can have SOPs that delegate things off to people who live halfway across the world. But I think people miss the opportunity of the simple checklist. Like, did we do it right? And how can we do it as fast as possible with the minimum amount of cognitive load so that we can take a hard thing and make it easy. I love that you said that because I recently just went on a month and a half trip to Arizona in my travel trailer to go visit her and in that trip I also knew that I was gonna go I have this rooftop tent on the top of my forerunner So sometimes I'll take the travel trailer out Park the travel trailer at like an rv park and then I'll go take off with the rooftop tent So like not only was I packing for a travel trailer trip for a month and a half But like I needed everything cooking pots pans all the things that I needed You But I also needed to pack for like camping. I needed to make sure I brought all the utensils and all the things that were for camping. And so it's so funny that you bring this up because I literally, I remember when I bought my travel trailer like years ago. It was with one of my biz besties, her name's Serena. And we were talking and she knows how much I love my SOPs. And I never had towed a trailer. I had never once hooked up one. I didn't even know how to like do it. I was just, I knew I really wanted one. The day that she came over, when I picked up the trailer, it was in Arizona, I bought it on a whim, took it over to her house, and I was just like, okay, you're gonna sit there and write out this step by step, I'm gonna walk you through how I'm doing it, so while I'm doing it, while I'm setting up the trailer, while I'm unhitching it, while I'm doing everything, I'm gonna say it out loud and can you please write it down. I literally have an SOP for how to Bring down camp and how to bring it back up for the travel trailer when I get somewhere. And I also have like, when I'm packing the travel trailer, I have a whole list on my notes app as well. of like the kitchen items. So I need this pot and this and the cheese grater and like all these different things. And then if I'm also camping, Oh, here's this other list over here. And so like I take the two lists and it has been so transformational for me. So like, like you said, guys, and for anyone listening, this is such a key opportunity for like, once you see systems once in your life, you see them everywhere and it's makes your life so much easier. And, you know, people, people will say, if I give voice to the contrary, it's like, I don't want to live like that. I don't want to live with all of my actions being sort of prescribed in that detailed way. And I would just say, listen, play jazz when it's actually fun to play jazz. I mean, You know, you're not going to have fun improvising getting out the door in a, in a completely different way. That is not fun. That's not where you want to improvise and play jazz. You want to improvise in like getting creative in your business and playing new games with your kids. Like these aren't the areas in your life where you're having a ton of fun doing it differently every time. It's actually just creating a ton of anxiety and uncertainty. It's making a A hard thing harder than it needs to be or take, you know, or missing an opportunity to take something that could have really drained you and turn into something that was just easy peasy, lemon squeezy. So these are the opportunities where we can very easily create just so much more ease and retain cognitive load in our life. And, you know, It's interesting, when you lose time, it's so easy to measure it, isn't it? When you worked 50 hours instead of 40, it's really easy to see that extra 10 hours. But when you're drained of energy, you don't get a really clear measurement of it. You just know that You come home at the end of the day. It's five o'clock. You've got plenty of time to do stuff, but you just don't feel like doing it. You just don't have the energy. And that's when you know that you've been burning cognitive load too fast. That even when you have the time to go to the gym. You don't want to go to the gym, even when you have the time to play with your kids or go on a date night, you just don't feel like it. Or you drag yourself out to a dinner party, but you just, you're, you're, you're not there. And that's when you know that you've burned too much cognitive loads, which great about systems. What's great about checklist is that you're giving yourself that gift of cognitive energy back that you don't know when you're going to need it. But boy, you know, when you have it, you're going to want it. Because when you've got a lot of excess cognitive load saves, you've given it back to yourself. It means that on the weekend you feel like actually going out. I'm going to do a workout. We've got that energy. Even if you're an introvert to go out and do a lunch with a friend. I love that. And I love that you're bringing up like the mental load that comes on the backside. Because it is true. Even if I want to be creative or like you said, if I want to go to the gym or paint or whatever, do these other things. Sometimes my brain can't handle even doing that because all day, my brain thinks about other things. And so that for me, I'm always trying to find a way to like systematize something. Or like I said, you can't unsee it. You can't see it. It's, you probably know, like, once you understand productivity systems, all these things, like, you really can't unsee it and you're always like, how do I make my life easier? How can I create these little containers and how can I make this more organized and understand where everything goes? And, but you're so right, because at the end of the day, like, this is why people are so burnt out and why they can't enjoy life or why fathoming a vacation is just non existent because they've just been using so much brain power every single day. And it's, it's golden BBs, not silver bullets. It's not like you're going to create one system and it's going to make all the difference for you. You're just going to start seeing all of these opportunities. You do one, then you'll see two more and you do those two, you'll see four more and you just keep doing that. And all of a sudden you come up for breath six months later and you just have more capacity. Where's all this time coming from? Where's this energy? Alyssa, before we get done, can I share with you my favorite new system that I've created? Yes, absolutely. I'm here for this. So my wife and I moved from Columbia where we are living abroad for almost eight years and we've moved back to the United States. So of course, we can't necessarily afford to have the 24 hour nanny service that we had before. So we're, we're being smarter and more value driven around. Okay. If we can afford to have somebody come into the house, we really need to get the most out of them. And so cleaning the house was a That's the big problem point because you know, you have a cleaner come, they come every two weeks, they clean it spick and span. But unfortunately, by the end of the same day when they came, it's a mess again. It just doesn't work. It's not providing value for us. It's too expensive. So we're having somebody come for 90 minutes every evening. Around the hour of four or five. So they're coming in the evening for 90 minutes, and we've got this checklist for them that we actually translated into Spanish because English isn't their native language. And so we created this checklist, use chat, GPT, generate it, change it into Spanish, and literally within 90 minutes, this woman is turning over the laundry. She's getting us all caught up on dishes and cleaning out the, you know, putting all the dishes away in the dishwasher and running the next load. She's, you know, vacuuming up all the dog hair off of the carpet, cleaning up all the kids toys, turning down the beds. I mean, it's insane the amount of work this woman can get done in 90 minutes. And that's 90 minutes. It's not just 90 minutes. It's 90 minutes at a time of the day when that is the last freaking thing that I would want to do. It's 90 minutes at a time of the day when my kids are really, really wanting to be with me and a really high energy. So it's, it's a pinch point. And I like to say that great systems aren't just the system. It's the right system at the right time with the right value attached to it. So for me. And this is, I'm only paying for 90 minutes of this person's time, but 90 minutes between the hours of four and five 30 hits so hard for me. The amount of like cognitive load and energy I get back to the increase to my lifestyle. This is money that I'll never not pay now. And because I've created a checklist, the checklist me get it to a point where It is hitting so hard for me. And I know you'll laugh because this woman was looking at me. I was literally following her with a computer as she was walking through this stuff and optimizing. And so this woman's like literally looking at me like I'm this complete freak. She's like, why is this guy following me with a computer? Because I'm just trying to get it down to the decimal so that from the moment she comes to the moment she leaves, we are really getting the maximum benefit and it's hitting as hard for us as we possibly can have it hit. I love that so much. Yeah, I have a house cleaner. I don't have kids. So I have a dog, but he doesn't have a lot of hair, which I'm very grateful for, but I definitely love like when my cleaner comes by and she comes by bi weekly and I'm thinking about increasing it actually to a week because for me, I don't really mess so much. I'm not too, I don't have kids. Like I said, it's a little bit harder when it's, uh, when you do have kids and you've got like for, for babies and all the different things that you have going on, there's so much movement in the house. And so I'm actually been really considering bringing her. And for me, that's like, that's me not having to clean. I genuinely like to clean. I like to organize things, but I don't want to do them all the time because then it feels like a chore to me. And I just don't desire it. It's so funny because the other day, my friend came over to my house Um, I'm building this new pantry wall and it's all because I want to get more systematized and organized and more efficient with the way I cook because a lot of the access to the food is a little bit further away than I want it to. So I'm creating all these like little things. I'm even building it into my home to make sure that it's like easy, efficient and accessible. And she came over and we went down to the garage area and she's like, I think this needs to be organized. I'm like, absolutely, because I bought way too many tools. I bought my house like a year ago, and I like to DIY my own stuff. And it's not even for cost savings, I just, that's my creative outlet, is like designing things, like, and creating like these new things in my home and renovating. And I was like, absolutely, this needs to be organized. And she goes, Oh, when are you going to do it? Maybe I could come over this weekend. I can help you do it. I was like, I'm not doing it. And she thought I was so crazy because she was like, what do you mean? You're not going to do it. She's like, you're just going to leave it like this. I was like, absolutely not. I'm going to call someone and pay them to come out here, a professional organizer who could probably do this way better than I can and get it set up one time. And now all I have to do is maintain it. Amen to that. So I think the learning lesson there, even if, for example, somebody is not going to use that exact system, it's just realizing that boy, if you hit the right system in the right moment, it's not just the money it saves you. It's not just the time it saves you. You can find that it's that one moment or that one thing that you really hate doing, or it's a moment in your year when you're being called to do something and you're really drained and it's the last thing you want to be doing. So don't discount the lifestyle or just experiential value of the right system at the right time, because boy, if it, when you're drained, I'll just bring it back to my analogy. When you're drained and you're alone, and my wife is traveling, and I'm trying to get all three of those kids and a dog out the house, I'll tell you what, I am, I am thanking my past self so much. Thank you, past Demir, for creating the system, because I don't know how I could have done this in this particular moment if I had, if I didn't have that system to follow. I love that so much the whole thinking your future self like, or for your past self, because there's a lot of those moments and a lot of it comes back to the business because this is where I spend a lot of like my mental space is here inside of the business and I run two businesses. So it's like, I might not be in the day to day operations of both of them, but I definitely am like the leader in them, and there's still a lot of heavy load and. We're currently cranking out a new course here at Workflow Queen. And it's just been a whole, it's a whole thing. And as you guys know, it's not easy to like crank those things out, even though I might not be writing all the bullet points for them and creating all the resources, it's still so much mental space. But however, we even have checklists for like creating a new program and making sure that we upload everything so that way I can pass it off to the team. And it's like. A lot of those things I did create at some point, but however, it's been evolved over the years and it's just been, yeah, I just, we can talk forever about all things, products of this too. We've been talking a lot about how you create a system for yourself and make it easier for you. Also remember that when you create systems for your team, you're making their life easier, and there's a part of them that is attributing that back to you. So we have this insanely low staff at Lifehack. We had a team member recently who left after 10 years and they only left because we basically kicked them out of the nest and said, you need to go do other glorious things in life. And part of the reason that we've gotten feedback from our team that, that they don't turn over is because they're like, we know that you guys are relentlessly focused on making our job as easy as possible. And when we tell you that something's a little bit kludgy or there's a friction point, or we're feeling tired or just bummed out about something, you are all over it to try as hard as you can to sand the rough edges off of that process. So if you're feeling like tax season is hitting you hard, your team's feeling it too. And so a big thing that you can do that can really increase your quality of life. Um, for your team members, reduce churn and turnover is to make sure that you're not just doing this for yourself. You're doing it for your whole team. And the great thing is this is a double win because most of these systems are resulting in better profitability, but they're also resulting in a team experience where people know that they just love working there, that there's ways of working. I can do it like this. And if I do it like this, it's going to work and I'm going to be happier. Yes, I love that. I think at the end of the day, like you said, churn is a huge thing, especially in this space. And I see a lot of people like, I don't know why this person didn't stay with me. I'm like, you literally just hired them and expected them to just because they had bookkeeping skills or accounting skills or tax skills that they just immediately knew how to operate. Like they know like the concepts that drive how to do bookkeeping, but they don't know how to do it for you, your clients, your business, your uniqueness. And so I love that because it's a big reason why most. People can't hang on to their team is because it's chaotic. Like I don't want to work in a chaotic space. Like life is already so chaotic. The last thing I would want to do is like work somewhere that I like felt like they didn't have their shit together. You know what I mean? And post pandemic, we experienced a big shift where post pandemic, a lot of people are willing to take less money because they want to have the lifestyle they want to live. And I'm, it's part of my brand. So of course we're. Relentlessly focused on lifestyle, but how hypocritical would it be if Carrie and I live this amazing lifestyle, but all of our employees were just like, you know, indentured servants, like, you know, chained to their desk working 80 hours a week. We don't live our lifestyle at the expense of our employees. They join us in this lifestyle design. And that's part of the reason that they want to stay. I'm doing annual reviews today after this, I did it, did some before and I'm doing some after. And I am just hounding them to be like, What part of your job is bothering you the most? It's just inconveniencing you. Where's the friction? And they're like, no, no, no, I love it. I'm like, nope, that's not good enough. Tell me, like I'm on a mission to make your job better. And you know, even if it's the most Stupidly small thing like let's get in there and let's send off those rough edges because nine times out of ten that also increases my profits. So it's just a win, win, win. It's like they've got a system. They know how to do it. It's easier for them. I've sent it off the rough edges and lo and behold, it's saving time and it's increasing profitability. I love that so much. And I, I know that we can do this all day, every day. And I'm so happy that we got the chance to like chat. Like I said, me and you, it's me and Carrie usually who communicate with Magnetic and it's just so much fun to like actually be able to chat because we can nerd all day about this. And I absolutely love this conversation. I took a lot of notes. And then also for anyone as the mentions of the books and any of the program information, anything that was kind of mentioned today, I did, I'm going to drop in the show notes as well. Yeah. But Damir, before we kind of head off, is there anything that you wanted to share? Maybe it's a last minute tip and also, let everyone know where they can connect with you, where's the best resource to get into your world and learn all things, productivity and all these fun things. Yeah. I mean, the last thought is. Plan. Plan your week, plan your month, plan your year. The more time that you put between yourself and the goals that you have, the more power that you create and the more leverage you create against it. And it doesn't even have to go to plan, because studies show that people who are more resilient Oh, that you have to plan, but the question is, is this something that's really a solid habit in your life? Are you doing it every single week? Because I can tell you that the 30 minutes that you plan your week are the most productive 30 minutes of your entire week. So we obviously wrote the book on it. You can go check out the book, winning the week, that's available on Amazon, but we also have a live masterclass. On our website that you can go take. So if you go to lifehackmethod. com and you want to learn our specific method for getting an entire week's planning down into 30 minutes or less, you can go to lifehackmethod. com and you can sign up for a masterclass and take that masterclass to learn more about how we do it. Yay. Well, thank you so much, Damir, for being here and also tell Kari I said, hi, and I miss her and I really, really appreciate you being here today. And thank you so much.