Lead In 30 Podcast

Beyond Time Management: Weaponizing Your Schedule

• Russ Hill

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The Lead In 30 Podcast with Russ Hill is for leaders of teams who want to grow and accelerate their results. In each episode, Russ Hill shares what he's learned consulting executives. Subscribe to get two new episodes every week. To connect with Russ message him on LinkedIn!



SPEAKER_01:

Forget time management. The real question is: do you use time as a competitive weapon? We'll dive into the science of leveraging time to force focus, drive growth, and stop settling for progress.

SPEAKER_03:

This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russell. You cannot be serious. Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_00:

Lead through change. Choose to be powerful, make decisions faster, and with buy-in. Check out the new 30-day leadership courses, now available from Lone Rock Leadership. You can watch the preview videos right now at LoneRock.io.

SPEAKER_01:

It is wild to watch the uh the initial reaction to us taking these models and frameworks that we've been using with executives for a long time and now make them available off the shelf in these courses of adapt in 30, decide in 30, power in 30. We had over 400 people register for our first webinar on power in 30. Think of it as like accountability 2.0. It's a decision if you show up powerless or if you feel powerless in a situation. It's a decision to show up powerfully. That's the uh the whole point of that course. We've spent years developing um what we used to teach around accountability and taking it to the next level, power and 30. So, anyway, if you want more information on those courses, it's awesome to see that initial group of 400 people who you just out of the blue wanted to be part of our initial webinar on that course. If you want to find out more, go to LoneRock.io. Lone Rock Leadership is our the name of our firm. I'm Russ Hill. I'm one of the founders, part of the team at our executive consulting company and our leadership training company. And uh I make my living coaching consulting senior executives at some of the world's biggest companies. We've taken what we've done over the last gobs of years and turned it into off-the-shelf solutions. If you listen to this podcast, you're like Russ, I already know that. Yeah, for the rest of you, Lone Rock.io. Go check it out. Okay, time as a competitive weapon. So I was reading a um a book recently, and um what's the name of it? The it's a it's a fast read um by a guy that um that uh some folks that I know know, um, but I've never met him. Um Dr. Ben uh Harding. Uh Benjamin Hardy, I think is I think I've got that right. And uh he's written a couple of books. I again I don't know him. Um I haven't read his other books, but this one I I think I actually listened to the audio. Like I was out doing yard work and I listened to it because I've got that Spotify thing. Have you all done that? Like, you know how Audible gives you one book a month or whatever the credit is? Um Spotify has got this thing, maybe some other companies have it too. Uh, you didn't even a lot of you didn't even know that Spotify had books, audiobooks, did you? Yeah, it's got podcasts, like it like Spotify is unbelievable. We we were gonna tell a story about them in our new book, Deliver, but ended up getting cut um for various reasons. But um, but it was really compelling with the research. Came back and showed us about the growth of that company and the founding of it. We'll talk about that in another episode sometime. But yeah, so Spotify is not just for music, it's got podcasts. You can listen to this podcast. Some of you probably are right now, you can um and you can listen to audiobooks. And they've got this feature to where you get instead of one credit a month, you get 15 hours of um audiobook listening per month, which I think is so much better. You don't have to pick one book, you can listen to a chapter of that book, three chapters of this book, uh, a few pages of that book, four chapters of that, just 15 hours total. And they've got like a family. Anyway, this is not a this is not a commercial for Spotify, but you know, you gotta share good stuff when you find it. And uh, and so you know, we've got the family plan with our kids, and so they each now had to pay more. Um, but like who wouldn't who wouldn't be willing to pay money to have their kids listening to books? Like, are you kidding me? It's been that before video games and all this other stuff any day of the week, right? So um, so my kids are using that too now, which is awesome. So anyway, so I'm listening to this book. I think it's called The Science of Scaling. The Science of Scaling. Um, I and and I I thought it was really interesting. The part that I listened to, it's just a quick read, whatever. I I'm not recommending it to most of you. Um you can go check it out, obviously, but I uh I'm gonna share something that came out of it that kind of made me think about uh this concept for this podcast episode. But the reason I don't recommend it is because it's more written, in my opinion. I could be wrong on this, but it struck me um after I got in a couple of chapters, I'm like, oh no, this book isn't um written for people that are in big organizations or that lead companies with more than like 20 people. It's written more for kind of like the uh that whole audience. Well, who's the guy that is making gobs of money right now? Alex Hermosy. Alex Hermozy, who's making gobs of money, um, you know, talking to these folks that are typically 20 years old to 30 years old and want to work for themselves. And um and so the the people like Alex go out and create these frameworks, and uh and and it's typically males, not only males, but it's this 20 to 30 year old male audience typically that buys all their stuff and then just make gobs of money telling you how you can create your own company and get rich and do all these sorts of things. And if it works, awesome. That's great. And so science of scaling is more written about, in my mind, I could get this wrong, um, about somebody who's like on their own or um so somebody who's got a little marketing company and they're a solopreneur and they want to grow and they want to scale it. Um, but and and so it wouldn't apply to most of us that uh are in this audience. Um, but I think it's great for that audience, um, at least potentially some of the some of the concepts. Some of them I was like, I don't know. I mean, but anyway, um it just I haven't had experience that reinforces some of that stuff, but but but some of the concepts are great. Okay, so one of the concepts that I think is great that got me thinking, because it ties to a principle that I'm a big believer in, which and the way that Ben or uh Dr. Hardy or whoever wrote it in that book, um the way they talked about it was using time as a tool. And I thought that was super interesting. Time as a tool. And so I was like, ah, I'll say more about that. And he did in the audiobook. And he he he talked about um, he got into Parkinson's law, right? And most of you are familiar with it. I'll just recap it for you if you don't know about it. Um, Parkinson's law is this idea that time will uh a task will fill the time allotted for it. So, in other words, if you have a project and you give yourself three months, you will stay, you you can occupy three months with that project. If you give yourself three hours, you can probably get the some of the main stuff done in three hours. You know, it's this is relative, and you know, there are there are all kinds of variables, obviously. But I see this all the time in the work that we do because we work with so many different organizations and so many different leaders. It's crazy. Like sometimes we'll it's it's wild. Sometimes I'll give you an example. Um, recently we sent an email out to um numerous executives that we work with, and we had a request and we said, will you review this thing and then give us some feedback on it? Like, do you do you do you agree with this? Do you like this? Do you not? So we sent it out to let's I don't remember how many. Let's call it 30 executives. And some of these folks lead tens of thousands of people. And and they've got bureaucratic organizations and they're highly regulated, and they've got, you know, a ton of attorneys that are influencing things. And so you you you you put their name on the list to send this email to, and I'm thinking, oh, I don't think she's even going to get back to us on that thing because of the culture inside her organization, or because of the industry that that company is in. What do you know? Like within 20, 30 minutes, or maybe a few hours later, sometimes within 24 hours, you get this response back that says, Hey, Russ, hey, whatever, Lone Rock, this is awesome. Yep, love it, go forward with this, or yep, made one change to that thing, go. And then you have other people who lead teams maybe of a thousand, maybe five hundred, may they they lead smaller teams or smaller organizations, and they literally take days and then you ping them or you say, Hey, by the way, did you have anything? Yeah, we're processing that, we're thinking about it. We're you're like, and I'm thinking, well, the person that has twenty times as many people underneath them as you in an organization that's global and yours is not, was able to move so much faster than you were. And it comes back to this concept, right? Kind of our attitude towards time. I'll give you a couple other examples. So in our organization, on the training side of our business, we've gotten certain results, key results that we want to hit this year, right? Well, we're not owned. We're not public, our our firm is not publicly owned. It doesn't have shares, it doesn't have a board of directors, it doesn't have a bunch of investors. We we built this thing um from the from the ground up, right? And so the three founders of us, we started on our own, and then we added people to it, and we've been building this leadership team and doing all these sorts of things, and we're self-funding it based on um uh just lots of different things, right? So we're not going into debt, we don't have lines of credit, we don't owe a bank anything, we don't we don't owe um shareholders, we don't owe investors anything. So there is nothing, there's no one. There's no one out there saying, hey, Russ, Jared, Tanner, the owners of Lone Rock Leadership, you all need to hit these key results by the end of the the year. There's no one doing that. If we don't hit it, who gives a crap? These are all self-imposed. And so these targets that we have, like, they kind of keep me up at night. Not really in a bad way, but actually in an energized way. Because at the time I'm recording this, we've got, you know, ever only so many weeks left in the year, and we're making great progress towards these uh, you know, some key results more than others, some we're crushing every month, some, you know, we're we've got a fair distance to go. But I am fully committed to doing everything within my power, and our team is too to try to hit those. And so meeting those goals and deadlines and results, like the clock is ticking. We've got to accomplish it, says who? Says us. That says me. That's our mentality. Another one, the book we've got coming out. By the time many of you are listening to this episode, it will already have been out. It's coming out um very soon. It's getting to the publisher next week. Like it's being typeset. Some of you don't even know what that anyway. This whole team that we've got assembled to it with people that are doing this and that and this and checking this. And anyway, this whole group that we we hired to help us with this one, they're they're like I'm getting pinged nonstop. And uh, this is the fourth book that I will be involved in. It's our biggest, it's uh like uh between 60 and 70,000 words. That's as just thick. Like it's nothing like decide to lead and other books that are, you know, where you can read it in one setting, one night or in a couple of days on, you know, whatever. It's super fast. This is different. It's very meaty. It's got tons of research in it, it's got tons of stories, it's whatever. And and so there is no one telling us you have to have it done by this time. It's all self-imposed deadlines. And so I'm literally like, ask my family, like I'm just consumed with it right now. I have been for weeks as we're trying to get it across the finish. Like, yes, I'm doing other things, and I've got birthdays in the family and family trips, and we've got this and that, and client engagements, and flying here and doing that. But any other time, any any moment that's around that, I'm squeezing work into because I gave myself a deadline. I gave us a deadline. We gave ourselves a deadline. Time as a tool. And so the the the takeaway or the thing that I want you thinking about is your relationship with time. So some people think when it comes to time management, it's about managing tasks. Okay, I've got these things on my calendar, I've got these things. This is the appointments I need to do. I've on my Google calendar, or my outlook calendar, or my whatever calendar, I've got these things that I'm managing all the different activities and that that's one element of time management, but it's basic. Like that's 20-year-old time management. That's not successful 40-year-old time management. I'm just using the ages kind of a, it doesn't really mean anything. I'm just talking about levels of success. That is not the way that a senior executive of a large company uses time management. It's not about putting the activities on a calendar. Like that's that's the 101 of the class. Like that's the general ed in your freshman year of college. But the senior level course of college or the postgraduate time management is no, it's it's your relationship with time. And so you work with these organizations that everyone, every single person listening to this podcast thinks they're busy. Goes back to the concept of the family that lived down the street for it from us here where we're at. And I thought we were crazy busy with four kids. They had eight. Eight. Well, how is that possible? And they were happy. They don't live down the street from us anymore. They're still friends of ours, but that's why I'm using it the past tense. But yeah, like doing good, managing it, making a good living. You know, the kids, for the most part, when they left the house, had clothes on and were, you know, like doing stuff, playing the instruments and extracurricular activities. Well, how is that possible? Because some of you have one kid and you're drowning, and you're thinking, like, how in the world, or your kids gone, like to college or whatever, is growing, you're like, oh my gosh, so busy. It's the same reason why some of you have a direct report team of five or an organization of a hundred, and you're like, oh my gosh, this is insanely complex. Well, why don't you talk to some of these folks that have hundreds of thousands of people underneath? How is that possible? That they do that and you do that. Like, you know what I mean? We all think we're busy. It goes to capacity, right? Capacity is not set. It's about your relationship with it. It goes back to the whole gym example, too, right? Like I I've shared this before. I get on there and I put a 45-pound plate or a 25-pound plate on something, I'm lifting it, and it takes a lot of effort. I'm like, wow, I'm kind of maxing out. And then I work out with you know our youngest son or somebody else, or or I'm just like just in a you know, total um power. Like I'm I'm I'm just super ready and and uh I wanted to use the word juiced, but you all would take that the wrong way. Naturally juiced, like just energized, right? I'm feeling good. I'm at the gym, I've got some energy, I'm motivated, like let's go. And so I put on twice as much weight as I normally do. I'm like, whoa, I can actually do that. I didn't like why have I been messing with the 25-pound plate for the last year and a half when I actually can do the 45 or whatever it is, right? Capacity, pushing it. And some of us, we just we we we don't we we're not managing that well. And so I would just have you think about using time as a tool. I love, love that phrase. However, you want to use it, there are different ways, leveraging time, and and the way you do that, lots of different ways, but one way is give yourself compressed windows. So I'm gonna do this by that. Whoa, are you sure? Like that's freak, yeah. And you don't do this, I mean you don't do it with 40 different things in your life, you're gonna like fall apart and crash, but with a few, and that's and then you build up capacity. People are like, how do you work out every day? Like, how do you talk because I've built the discipline and the priority and I may whatever. How do you get this many things? Because I'm that's what I'm doing. And so have you gotten too complacent? Are you giving yourself too much time? You're kind of floating down the lazy river at your org. And by the way, you want to work at an organization with people that help you with this because you're a reflection of their attitude towards it. It's just the way that it works. That's why I love in my friend group people who own companies, people who've sold companies to private equity or different things, people who are executives of different things. Not everybody I know is that, and they're different, but I love having those people in my friend group or my social circles. Why? Because they're driven. Crazy driven. And then what does that do? That rubs off on me like it's contagious. Love being around people that want to be active, want to get off the couch, want to go do stuff that like they're loading up their days. They aren't sitting around going, you know, I don't want to work with people like that. I don't want to be, I've been at that organization. I've worked for that leader, been a part of that culture. And, you know, there's the other side of it where, you know, like again, going back to not not to make this uh mention private equity too much, but there are extremes to it. And I'm not advocating that. Like, not not that where we're gonna grow this company by this, and you've got to get that kind of revenue. I'm like, okay, you've lost your mind. Like, you're just, yeah, okay, I get it. It's all about numbers to you. No, and I'm not about that. So there's an extreme to what I'm talking about. That's just, can we all just kind of roll our eyes at that approach and go, no, that sucks too. Um, but but I just would have you look at that continuum. I'd have you look at the deadlines you're giving yourself and had how how much urgency, or is it okay if you miss that deadline? Is it okay if you actually don't go to the gym? Is it okay if you don't write that book or get that article out or finish that degree or get that promotion or complete that project or hit that revenue target or crush that sales number or close that whatever, accomplish this by then? Are you just it's kind of okay, it's cool. Well, then yeah, you're on the lazy river and you're making all kinds of exceptions. And there are instances where exceptions are totally valid because your mental health uh depends on it, your emotional health, or life's just you got different things going on. Family or little kids or different things, and so I get it. Like there, there those are but that's for a season, and then we're gonna dial it back up, and we're gonna use time as a tool. And so just give your just I just something for you to think about. At the way you lead your team and the way you run your own life in as a in in a career professional way? Are you okay if you go another year without really whatever? Are you okay if you don't make more money next year than this year? Are you okay if your career doesn't really grow? Are you okay if you're not learning and the growth curve's kind of um not that steep anymore? Are you okay if this project takes whatever? Are you okay if is it all right if we missed that target in this organization or that one? And man, I tell you what, the most successful executives that I have met over the years, when they put a key result on the flip chart, there's no question about their commitment to make it happen. Then there are others you walk into and you're like, yeah, it's kind of optional. We'll write it there. It's nice wallpaper, window dressing, but time is not a tool. Things to think about in this episode. Because I want you successful. I want you to achieve your potential. I want next year to be 3x with this year, 5x, 10x this year. I want the year after to be. I want you to because it's not so much about the money, yes, the lifestyle and the freedom and all that crazy good. It's about your potential, what you possibly could accomplish. About who you could be impacting, about the wisdom you could be sharing, about the lives you could be touching, about the the services you could be developing, the products that could come out of you. Like, that's it. I want to see you achieve that. I just don't know if you actually want it. And if you do, use time as a tool. I'll talk to you in the next episode of the Lead in Thirty podcast.

SPEAKER_03:

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