Ep03 BuyBackYourTime final
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[00:00:00]
Stacey: Hello and welcome back to Your New Release: stories, shifts and the books change us. Or we'll just make noise and hit things while we're doing the intro.
Kirsten: I love it. I'm so excited to be here. Stacy, tell me something amazing that happened to you this week.
Stacey: Well, I actually resigned from a job that I didn't think was serving me, and so I'm really excited because I feel like it lets me put my energy where it should be and find somebody else for that job who is gonna love it more than I loved it.
Kirsten: So tell me a feeling that you had before you submitted the letter and then a feeling that you have now.
Stacey: Before I put the letter, I was actually a little unclear on how to frame it, so there was a little bit confusion. I was a little excited, but I was a little nervous.
And then [00:01:00] today I feel like a ton of relief and a lot of excitement. Much more peaceful. I would love to say I had more clarity, that I'm ready to dive into my coaching and my real estate business in a bigger way, but I think it's gonna take a little bit of time because I resigned for like 90 days from now.
Not for 90 seconds from now.
Kirsten: It wasn't a, and here's my box and I'm walking out the door.
Yes. Well, and sometimes that actually happens in medicine, right? Where you like give notice and you think you're giving them this and they're like, let's just walk with you.
Stacey: Well, it doesn't happen in medicine that much, but I work for an insurance company.
It does happen in the insurance company all the time.
Kirsten: I think if I had one like cool thing this week, I really enjoyed when you and I sat down and talked about just how to look at your business. And I think the fact that we are talking about Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time. It is all kind of the universe aligning up and being like, behold, here is the book. We will make this happen in your lifetime.
So for those of you who are not familiar with this [00:02:00] amazing book, I'm gonna say that you just have to check it out.
I think that this book is like a true masterclass in kind of reclaiming your time, building a business that serves like not only your work, but your whole life instead of the other way around. So you want a life that like leads to work and not work that leads to life. So I think that Dan's focus is primarily about entrepreneurs, but it can apply for a little bit of everybody, but it's just about like breaking away from the grind and just being like.
Here is some practical advice. Here are some things that you need to be doing, figuring out what is your lane of brilliance and how can you delegate the stuff that does not fill your cup, bring you joy or is not the best use of your time. And so, I think a little bit of that is just, it's so empowering and it's very emotionally neutral, right?
So much of that stuff that we end up taking too much on there can be a lot of shame and like crappy stories we're writing to ourselves about ourselves when there's stuff that we don't like or whatever, and so I think that that is, [00:03:00] is my huge takeaway. So I think the book can definitely be one of your new BFFs.
So what about you, Stacy? What do you think about this amazing, fabulous, and beautiful book?
Stacey: I agree with everything you said and the one phrase that I cannot get outta my head. Well, first of all, he is all about the fact that- it seems clear because he calls it Buy Back Your Time- but that your time is your most valuable resource.
But I love what he said, that if you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant. And it was like my aha moment when I realized, oh shoot. Like I am my assistant and no wonder I'm getting bad help because I am not great at this job. So I also liked how he really said, it wasn't just like, what's your zone of genius?
Right? But it's like, what do you like, how do you put together the things that you like with the things that you're good at? And he calls it the productivity quadrant. But for anybody out there who's done some time management work. You've probably seen an Eisenhower Matrix and it talks about how important something is versus how urgent something is.
And this is sort of his entrepreneurial version, like how much do you enjoy [00:04:00] doing it and how good are you at it? because turns out I'm a terrible assistant. I would fire myself. I'm not great. I'm like all over the place. I'm not great at writing non-standard operating procedures.
I expect you to be in my mind. Like these things don't work well in business. His idea of how do you sort of work your way through a quadrant of ways and it like was both the way you felt, which was interesting to me, as well as the kind of person you needed to hire in order to get out of that feeling. And so I liked that part.
Kirsten: And then particularly if what you're known for is being kind of a badass and being great at learning new stuff. You can get in your own way with a lot of it. Because if you have a strong self image and you're like, not only am I look cute, but I look cute in so many hats, then it can be hard to be like, oh, well that hat isn't, you know, nearly as flattering.
And so it is kind of like the Marie Kondo of professional development because you get to decide what is it that brings you joy? What is it that makes you feel cool? There are so many parts of my [00:05:00] job that honestly, I probably would be better off to delegate, but it makes me ridiculously happy. And so that helps with that work-life balance.
And it also helps in me giving myself permission to enjoy that stuff.
Stacey: But at some point you might find some of those things you do need to hand off even though you like them because somebody else may be more efficient or even better than you at it. Don't tell Kirsten.
And then the other thing is that you're giving somebody else the opportunity to do something they love while you get to do what you love. So I love that thought too.
Kirsten: So you could say, I love this big ol' pot of chili. You know, that may be true, but maybe what it means is that you like working with the beans or you like seasoning the tomato sauce or whatever.
There may be little micro pieces of that whole process, and if you're applying this grandiose paintbrush, or serving spoon over the whole thing, then it's the awareness about questioning your biases. When I thought about, Okay, if I'm talking with business people or people that are just over committed, they're working 16 hour days, they've got families, they're [00:06:00] managing relationships, they're managing self care, you know, it's not an urban legend it turns out, there are so many things that you should be asking yourself that, in my mind, kind of are driven from this Dan Martell book. What tasks energize you and align with your strengths? There are certain things that we can be good at, we can totally rock at, but if it drains you to the point where you're desperately looking around for any piece of chocolate, then you know that's probably not the best fit.
So what tasks can be delegated without compromising quality? So there are some things that you know, that is B minus work gonna be okay?
Stacey: Absolutely.
Kirsten: That is really, really hard. And that's how this podcast is, right?
Like, it's not like you and I are professional podcast people, you know? I mean, we are having a ball and we hope that people are enjoying it, and it's only gonna get better from here, we hope. You know? But it's not like this was my purpose to be put on earth. It's just like, it's a wonderful way to share my passion and joy and stuff that I like.
And then with you in particular, Miss surgeon woman, what's your hourly [00:07:00] rate? So if you're doing something that maybe you'll be paying somebody like a VA 10, $12 an hour, and then you compare that against your hourly rate at some point it just becomes stupid. And so you just kind of have to call yourself out like that.
Stacey: I love you said like that you just reiterated is, even if I'm great at doing something, somebody else doing it, 80% as well as I do, is a hundred percent freaking amazing. I think that's literally the quote.
Kirsten: Right. Especially if they can get you, you know, 80, 90% of the way there, even 70% of the way there, and so that you have to come in and just kind of wave your magic wand and zhuzh it a little bit, you know?
And then it's just fine. You come and you taste the chili and you're like, it's a little shy on some cumin. And so then you just sprinkle that in, stir a little bit and you're like, good enough. My dad had this german potato salad that we grew up. My whole, my mom had spent days doing this like days, days, days.
And you know, her back hurt and then I realized that if I just bought the Kroger Southern kind and then I add in like celery seed and [00:08:00] bacon and hard boiled eggs, we were 95% of the way there. And you know, I will take that all day long to a family picnic.
Stacey: The other thing I liked is when you just talked about figuring out your worth, right? So if I think about, and I'm just gonna use round numbers because it's easy. If you're somebody who makes a hundred thousand dollars a year, he basically says divide it by 2000.
I know there's 2080 hours, blah, blah, blah. Take some vacation. So if you divide it by 2000 hours, you're making $50 an hour. And he even said, look, divide that by four. And if you can find somebody who's gonna be able to do it for 12.50 an hour or less, you are wasting your time and there's absolutely VAs or people on Fiverr or people on Upwork or you know, whatever it is.
But if it takes me 10 hours and somebody can very efficiently do it in two hours, even if they charge $25 an hour, that 50 bucks makes way more sense than my 10 times $500, right? He really does tell everybody, like, go through and figure out what you make an hour, and if it's like less than a [00:09:00] quarter of that, you should absolutely not be doing it. And that is a really conservative number. Like there's probably a number a little higher than that, that there's some things you're like, great, the efficiency of scale and especially if you hate it, like there's things I hate doing. It'd be worth a lot.
Kirsten: I think there's another piece as women in particular, sometimes have this obliger stuff. You know, like, it's easier for me to do stuff that I've committed to for you than I do for me. So for me, when I decided that I was going to leave my W2 job and go out on my own, I decided that getting a VA was really a fabulous use of my time because from the get go I could delegate stuff, but it also made me feel much more like, this is a real business.
Like, it validated, it gave me this sense of credibility, like. Oh, look, I am investing, it didn't feel like a hobby. Like when I maybe sold Pampered Chef or whatever when my kid was little and I would go around and just get people drunk and sell them cool kitchen stuff. It really felt like this is serious.
I'm taking this seriously. I'm [00:10:00] viewing it as a business. And I think when I worked, with real estate investors who were doctors, so many of them felt like they had to get to some level of success or profit or. There was some kind of standard that they were thinking about they had to get to before they were willing to invest in a VA. And yet, it's amazing. Once you make that commitment, it's the power of the decision, right? Once you make that commitment, the universe will open up like, oh, you could use this and you could use this, or you can use that. Or hey, like, maybe I don't have 40 hours a week for a VA, but you know what?
This other person that has a business might too, and let's co-share, you know, let's work together so that we can be making the best out of it. Like, there's so many different ways to be creative and I really hope that people just hear that the importance is doing the 'how can I' rather than a 'not yet', forget that.
Like housekeeping, you know, if you're scrubbing your own toilets, and you are making a certain price point, like we just need to talk. [00:11:00] Unless you've got some like OCD issues and you could take that up with your therapist and that's fine and dandy, but you know, in general, nobody should be cleaning their own toilets.
Unless that's something that they truly enjoy, which I have yet to meet any of those people.
Stacey: Yeah. I will tell you, even as a resident, when I didn't make that much money. It was something I hated doing and it made me so joyful when somebody else did it that, even if I did it once a month, I was like, this is worth the time and the money and the energy.
I would say in the academic world, not everybody's gonna relate necessarily to I'm an entrepreneur, I'm starting a business. They're like, I work for a big corporation, or a not-for-profit university. But there are still ways that you can hire a research assistant or get a scribe for clinic or find somebody who can help you format your poster or edit your paper. Like these services all exist. And on top of it, there's this other piece that he talks about in the book, finding people who will do it for free because there's an exchange in there that's useful.
So maybe you really love working on an anesthesia project. And there's an anesthesia colleague who's great at editing. You [00:12:00] guys do projects together, you're great at the IRB, they're great at the editing. You find people who have complimentary skills and you're not necessarily even exchanging money. You're exchanging your zone of genius that you enjoy for their zone of genius that they enjoy.
Like I used to love to do the statistics for papers. People hated doing that and they would do all the IRB and stuff like that, which I didn't really love. So I'm like, this is a win.
Kirsten: But I think that's also the importance of surrounding yourself with people who are driven and excited and have a vision, like I love having you as a thought partner in my life because it makes all these other areas more colorful, more creative in ways that I would never even have considered.
Like, we don't know what we don't know. And so just having you as a thought partner to be like, let me run this by you. And sometimes when we fill up our entire schedule and everything's planned and we don't have any of that extra wiggle room, it kind of makes your brain go into slow-mo.
And so if you can say to yourself, Hey, if I had [00:13:00] five extra hours a week, what could I do with that? And just that kind of openness, the importance of play and being creative and like how and what could that look like and just kind of dancing that dance, it can be a complete trajectory game changer.
Stacey: I'm gonna also say, you talked about what happens to women in general and women in medicine. We all take on these like tasks that don't get compensated for. They don't lead a promotion, they're non-value-added tasks. We feel this guilt if we don't say yes to them. And so this is the time to really look at, are you putting your time and your energy-
like if you love doing the thing that you've been asked to do, even if it's not something that gets you promoted, great. Consider it until you really don't have time for it. But if you don't even like doing it, absolutely stop doing that stuff.
Kirsten: I think that that's huge. So I wanna go back and *rewind noise* the tape, and I just want you to talk about these non promotable tasks that we take on because I think it's something that we don't even think about.
Stacey: If I'm the one who arranges the [00:14:00] lunch. I might be the one who sets up the meeting. I make sure the room's available. These are administrative tasks that if you're leveraging 'em to the right level, probably nobody who's listening to this is thinking that's their level.
And so I really admonish people. That stuff feels like you're providing service and you are, but it disproportionately gets asked of people like women. Who are more likely to say yes, and it absolutely takes up your time from doing things that you may enjoy more hopefully than ordering coffee, that's the kind of stuff I feel like happens all the time. You're always organizing something, and it's always around some kind of, all the social events that we organize. They're nice, but they never get anybody promoted. Nobody was like, oh, she threw the best graduation party.
She should be a full professor.
Kirsten: Okay. So if somebody has found themselves wearing that, like hostess role instead of the badass role, what are some of the ways that, that you have coached some of your clients to kind of roll some of that back? To set some boundaries, to kind [00:15:00] of just make space for things that feel better instead of just wanting to be liked and you know, seen as appreciated.
Stacey: Yeah, I really think so much of it is understanding where you wanna go and your values. So if you know that what you wanna spend your time on is sleep apnea research, if it doesn't fit in that vein, it's easier to tell your leadership like, Hey, I think we all have the same goal which is, you know, national recognition.
And for me to do the things with the department that get us recognition and out there and acknowledgement and patient referrals. And so I'm really gonna focus my time on whatever you both agreed is important. There's no chair out there who's gonna be like, you're right. Making sure we have coffee for the social hour is the most important promotable task.
Like, so some of it is acknowledging where you're doing that stuff. And actually the book, he talks about a time audit. So taking your time, looking where you're spending it and figuring out what you can delegate. This is the kind of stuff where you probably have an admin person in your department, you just haven't leaned on them.
And it's okay at some point to recognize [00:16:00] chairs actually ask men to do this stuff and they say no. So we can actually say no. And it's okay. It's not the end of a beautiful relationship. And that's the other thing I think people get stuck on is that my setting boundaries may be perceived as my being somebody who's not nice or not kind, or not a team player, but it could also just as long as you frame it in the way that this is about what's good for the department, and it's for us to get to the level we both wanna get to. It's okay to frame your successes as the department successes because they are, and they're not gonna come from ordering coffee.
Kirsten: Well, and chairs and managers and leaders- often these are people who have amazing skill sets in that zone of brilliance.
But it's not like there are a lot of leaders out there who have become leaders because they have the most amazing leadership skills. People are not taught how to manage people. So, as a leader, sometimes the easiest team to manage is the one where there is no ruffles, [00:17:00] and so if you don't even see the wheels that need to be squeaked or how you can bring a light out in somebody and nurture that, and you just think like, oh, the boat is not rocking, so it must be a party. Everything is going beautifully well.
Rather than somebody who is like, you know, is that person really showing up as their favorite self? Like, how can I help them grow? That's not gonna be my highest priority sometimes if I'm a leader who really doesn't see where that is important. They've never been taught that that's an important part of being a leader.
And I feel like whether that's you know, my background is in education yours is in medicine, but anything, even like, you know, any kind of commercial business or whatever, like the people who are so good at looking at statistics.
You're going to suddenly be in charge of all these people who manage statistics with a completely different skillset set, and we're not setting people up for success by not helping our managers know how to set us up for success. Like assuming my manager knows what gives me [00:18:00] passion, that's not a win-win situation.
But if I can give them a clue like, Hey, this goes really well, that's my fire, then they're much more likely to feel connected to me. They're much more likely to feel like they can contribute to my success. It really does become people like helping people just, we don't necessarily know how.
Stacey: You can ask for the thing you want, right? Like you can walk in the room and be like, that's what I want you to assign me.
Kirsten: Yes. And knowing like, Hey, can you help me be accountable to this? This is something I, you know, haven't always been good at, and it didn't really show up as well. Like, I'd really like to work on that this quarter.
Like those are the conversations that we want to be having with true leaders who are excited and feel. Like they are getting their cup filled by helping other people step up.
Stacey: Okay. So if you're gonna give everybody a takeaway from this book, what should they do today, tomorrow, in the next 17 minutes, so that they can learn from this book and do something good for their life?
Kirsten: I would say make a list of the five things in your world that you dread the most [00:19:00] and figure out is there a way to delegate or automate some of that.
Stacey: Absolutely.
Kirsten: How about you?
Stacey: I think honestly, I wasn't gonna say five because I feel like you're being far more optimistic than I was. I was like, pick one.
Kirsten: I feel like you need at least a few to have a choice. So, I'm coming at it from a like gamification view.
Stacey: Oh, absolutely. I think I was coming from it from an overwhelmed, like, I just need to find one thing.
And the other thing is just knowing you don't need to do it all. So really find your team, whether it's someone to clean your house or mow your lawn or scribe in your clinic, or order the coffee. Well, thank you guys. Anything else as parting thoughts, Kirsten?
Kirsten: No. I'm just, I'm really excited.
It's so funny to me how we're reading all these books and they all just kind of kiss and touch each other in different ways on the way that they overlap and support the concepts. So, you know, Buy Back Your Time definitely ties into some of the stuff that we've done in our first Atomic Habits.
There's lots of that with the whole 1% stuff. And then, Gap and the [00:20:00] Gain is coming up, and so I'm very excited. And again, I'd love to hear what other books are out there, that people are reading, that they're curious about. But yeah, this was great. Thanks, friend.
Stacey: Okay. So thank you for joining us at Your New Release: stories, shifts, and the books that change us. We'll be back in two weeks hopefully to give you, our update on the next book. And I think our next one is
Kirsten: Gap and the Gain.
Stacey: So we'll talk to you in a couple weeks.
