#66 - Learning to Love Tradeoffs + Some Tactics to Reclaim Your Time
Specific tactics for your month + how embracing tradeoffs can force you to find new ways of living your life that can ultimately help you have a more fulfilling existence.
Note: I’m a Dad! Our son was born late in September. We absolutely love him. Being a Husband, Father, and Founder takes time, and as such I’m moving Exonomist to being more of a monthly fun exercise. There may be a time when this gets back to being “(mostly) weekly”, but this is what the times call for. Just like I’m writing about tradeoffs this week, the tradeoff I’m making here is to do Less of one thing so I can do More of other things… And as I’ll be writing about below, sometimes less is more. Embracing tradeoffs can be magical.
TL;DR - Embracing tradeoffs can force you to find new ways of living your life that can ultimately help you have a more fulfilling existence.
Since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with the concept of a trade-off. This is likely not a new term for you, but let me define is simply for the sake of clarity: a tradeoff is the change in value an actor experiences by picking one thing over another.
That change in value can be binary:
I want to do X, so I can’t do Y
But oftentimes what happens in actual life is:
I am going to do slightly more of X, which implies that I will do slightly less of Y
Of course, you can do incrementally more of X (and thus incrementally less of Y) until Y no longer happens at all
These tradeoffs are happening all around you, every day. You’ve probably made a hundred tradeoffs today alone by the time you’ve read this. You choosing to read this letter means you’re not doing something else.
One way to think about tradeoffs is in how you spend your time. Here’s an example of tradeoff exercise I had to do nearly three years ago when I met Overline for the first time.
“I want to build my venture capital skillset, but I don’t want to leave my full-time job at rocket ship startup because it gives me a ton of joy and also financial security.”
The tradeoff here was in the actual hours I had in the day. The GPs (general partners) at Overline were willing to collaborate with me in my spare time (without me leaving my full-time job), but that meant less “free time”
In this situation, the tradeoff was to pursue a very very rare opportunity to help fulfill a life goal / mission, and with two of the absolute finest human beings I have ever met personally and intellectually. Most people would’ve said No Way to this arrangement, but I didn’t because I came to realize that the tradeoff wasn’t really a tradeoff. Why?
Well, I was already spending at least one hour per day reading up on startups, venture, and entrepreneurship as a topic more broadly. So to find the time for Overline, I simply cut back on reading about these topics to actually practice more. Additionally, I found other dimensions from which to TAKE time from. Here are other things I cut:
I stopped checking Instagram every day. To this day, I only log onto Instagram once per week, and it’s for barely more than 3 or 4 minutes at a time. I go to the same three chats whenever I’m there, and then I log off. Yes, this means I miss many life updates from friends, but if the news is that important and you really want me to know about it, you would have sent me a text on it (TIME SAVED: ~35 MINS)
I shifted my general learning time into workouts — during runs, cycling sessions, walks. I started listening to more podcasts and audiobooks (TIME SAVED: ~20 MINS)
I forced my core work schedule into a tight box and dared myself to find ways to do more with less time —> forced me to learn how to delegate more effectively, how to be more clear about assignments and outcomes, and how to structure my calendar hyper effectively into categories that I wrote about in the earliest Exonomist letters — GSD, GND, GTD (Get Shit Done, Get Nothing Done, Get Thinking Done). I also learned to be brutal with prioritization in a way I didn’t know was possible before. (TIME SAVED: 1 HOUR)
I stopped texting as much. It drains my energy to stare at message boxes waiting for responses, so I simply don’t anymore. Texting is like e-mail for me — I check at set intervals for the most part when I can dedicate full intention to a message (TIME SAVED: ~20 MINS + MORE FLOW STATE TIME)
I shifted catch-ups into more phone calls with friends + prioritized doing trips or seeing people in person for meals, walks, or visits
Luckily, it seems that most of the people I speak to regularly also do this with non-urgent communications
If you add all of this up, I basically found a way to recapture over two hours of time per day. That’s how I made doing two jobs work. That’s how I found a way to dramatically increase my rate of learning every week for years, and that’s not even the best part.
The best part is that I started to be way more deeply focused on whatever was right in front of me. Because I knew there was limited time for things, I super duper invested in focusing on whatever I was doing. In general, I don’t like to half-ass anything, even responding to a text message. And in focusing more, I found new ways of looking at moments in time.
Put another way, imagine you’re in an art gallery — the MoMA in NYC. If you look at a piece of art for 15 seconds, you’re getting a lot. … But what if you were to gaze into that work of brilliance for 3 minutes. If you are focusing, you’ll probably find things about the piece that you didn’t in the first 15 seconds. You’ll derive more from it. Now, imagine if you did that with every piece of art in that particular gallery. Let’s say there were 10 works of art you’ll do this for in that gallery. That’s 30 minutes. But that’s a very very focused 30 minutes that allowed you to glean more from that particular experience than if you had only done 15 seconds per piece of art.
Apply this to your life and what you do, and you might discover that…
Embracing tradeoffs can force you to find new ways of living your life that can ultimately help you have a more fulfilling existence.
By choosing to spend more time in that gallery, yes: you’ve spent less time exploring other galleries, or you’ve taken away time from other things you want to do. Sometimes you want to “skim” and that’s great, but “skimming” on the things in your life that are important to you … and skimming as a habit can leave pretty awesome possibilities undiscovered.
One more place this embracing of tradeoffs can be powerful is in business strategy. I’m a broken record on this but strategy is about choice. WAIT, CHOICES —> TRADEOFFS?! YES.
Here’s an example of how embracing tradeoffs could lead to better outcomes in business.
Situation: You have $150k to spend on growth. You can spend it on a sales FTE (full time employee) or a marketing FTE or an operations FTE who will help you track all of the workstreams in motion
The potential mistake in this situation is to actually make a decision using the options provided to you. I recently asked a potential hire this question to see how they responded, and the answer was, “Sales because sales is what provides revenue.” This wasn’t a bad answer, but it missed an opportunity to ask discovery questions —> to learn more about the fictional situation —> to potentially develop creative solutions. Here’s a better answer:
First ask the question, “What is the business trying to achieve broadly? What about across each of these functions — sales, marketing, ops? What is the talent capability like there today? Is there any budgetary flexibility?” etc.
Then add a constraint, for example: “What if I only had $15k — 10% of that amount — to get the same results?”
You might realize that you don’t need a full-time marketing strategist on the team. You need someone to execute campaigns, and you would like to have a marketing guru available. Maybe you could consult with a marketing expert and hire them on a contract basis to help develop your strategy, and then also contract out the marketing operations / execution work… Which leaves you with more budget to hire a sales FTE. Maybe you can actually do both. In other words, maybe the tradeoff here isn’t so dire.
In fact, is it possible that you can find someone who has sales experience, but also really enjoys operations? (The answer here is Yes. You can. You definitely can).
And do you actually need a FTE to run your workstream tracking? In this modern technology-defined era, are you going to tell me you can’t adopt one of the hundreds of softwares that help you to automate most of the work here? Don’t know how to get this setup? Go talk to people like my friend Ernesto Mandowsky who runs a consultancy to help companies do this. He’s not cheap, but he’s also not as expensive as that expensive operations hire you were just thinking about making (BTW, Ernesto is top of mind because I introduced another close friend to him earlier today — I am not paid for referrals. I just actually know he’s great at what he does)
The situation above is of course tightly constrained and espouses the value of fractional work and automation… But there are of course times when you need to make FTE investments to build longer-lasting capabilities. Outsourcing everything is dangerous. Outsourcing some things is smart. When you outsource what — and to what extent — changes over time
Coming back up to a slightly higher altitude for a second. I’ve long loved the whole saying “do more with less” … which has definitely been something many big company executives have been espousing for the last couple of years amidst a tighter monetary environment (Satya Nadella says this all the time, and he’s not the only one…). I like the idea of forcing yourself to be creative with whatever you have, and/or finding places to recapture time to re-allocate to higher-value things.
In the end, what freaking value am I getting from scrolling on social media for 45 minutes per day? Yes, I totally get the need to “decompress.” If this works for you, keep doing it. But know that spending 45 minutes there is 45 minutes you aren’t spending on something else that is potentially more energizing or fulfilling.
As always, moderation is important. Sometimes you just need to be a complete potato and just scroll reddit for an hour (…I definitely do this from time to time), but being self-critical about things like that becomes habits is the insight here. Dig into habits — things you do regularly — to find opportunities to reclaim your time. And from a business strategy perspective, dig into preconceived notions / established norms your company has around how to get things done and think about what you’d do if you have 50 or even 90% less time or resources to accomplish the same goal. Startups all over the world are doing this every day, and winning.
Michael