Less Stress, More Productivity, with Ari Meisel – Episode 122 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Author, entrepreneur, and “overwhelmologist” Ari Meisel reveals how to optimize, automate, and outsource, gives a masterclass in Virtual Assistants 101, explains what delegation REALLY means, and breaks down the “3D” inbox zero plan.

About Ari:

Ari Meisel is an author and entrepreneur who successfully overcame Crohn’s disease. In 2006, Ari was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Crohn’s is an incurable disease of the digestive tract. Ari’s case was severe, and required over a dozen daily medications and several hospital visits. After reaching a personal low point in hospital, Ari decided he would do everything in his power to strengthen his by then weak body. Through a combination of yoga, nutrition, natural supplements and rigorous exercise (Triathon and Crossfit) he was able to fight back the symptoms of Crohns until he was finally able to suspend his medication. Eventually Ari was declared free of all traces of the ‘incurable’ disease, and competed in Ironman France in June of 2011. Ari has since spoken at seminars and at a regional TED Talk about his struggle against a seemingly insurmountable opponent. Through the process of data collection, self tracking, and analysis, Ari helped develop Less Doing. This was a way of dealing with the daily stresses of life by optimizing, automating, and outsourcing all of his tasks in life and business.

Learn more at LessDoing.com and AriMeisel.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
This gentleman you’re about to hear from. His name is Ari Meisel. He has an amazing story. He was diagnosed with an incurable and very painful chronic condition, which we’re going to talk about, and I’ll let him tell you about it, and the strategy that he used to save his life and get his life back also then turned into a system of productivity that he has built a huge online following around now teaching people how to do this. The system’s called Less Doing and More Living. So Ari, thanks for being here. Just tell everyone like, what’s your story? What was the condition you had to kind of tell us what the trajectory your life was on, and then what change you made, and what was the result of that?

Ari Meisel
So, I was working in construction. I was in real estate development in upstate New York, and I was, I was living a very hard lifestyle. I was working, you know, 1618, hours a day in not the safest conditions. I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. I was eating fast food, drinking stress beyond my mind, and basically broke myself. When I was 23 I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, which, as you mentioned, is an incurable illness, and it was a very, very rough for a few years, and I was on a lot of meds, and I kept getting sicker, and then basically had this big turnaround where I went on this long journey of self tracking and self experimentation. And about four months after that, I got off my meds, and two months later, was in my first triathlon. And the way that that sort of all confluenced into creating what I do now is that I went from a place where I was working 18 hours a day to barely being able to do an hour of work a day, and I was also stressed out of my mind. So less doing basically, was born out of this need to mitigate stress and get more done in one hour than I had been able to get done in a full day before.

Host
And so before we dive into kind of how that applies in the professional world, what were some of the things that happened? What are some of the things that you did?

Ari Meisel
Well I did a lot of experimentation, but I ended up with a high fat, low sugar diet. So that was a big one exercise, not that I recommend Iron Man, but exercise to the extent that I was really ramping up my metabolism. So I was able, in my opinion, to burn through food a lot better. Which one of the issues with Crohn’s is that you end up getting obstructions because you have all the scarring. So that was helpful. And then it really all came back to stress, you know, because you can tell somebody, and I’ve replicated my results in dozens of other Crohn’s patients at this point, but you can tell somebody, Hey, you want to feel better, eat this, take these supplements and do these exercises, and it’s prescriptive, and they can do it or not do it. But if you say to somebody, okay, now you need to manage your stress, it’s, it’s way more nebulous. You know, it’s a lot harder for people to sort of get their hands around that. So I wanted to create a really systematic way of doing that. So the overall framework, the baseline framework, is that I help people optimize, automate and outsource everything in their lives, including their health, in order to be more effective. And it’s just a very important order for me, because most people in the modern world have an experience with delegation, even if it’s just telling your kids to do their chores. But the problem is, is that a lot of people get into this mode where they tell somebody to do something, and that’s it. That’s the end of it. And that’s not true delegation. And really what you’re just doing is basically sweeping the dirt under the rug. It doesn’t make the problem any better. You’re just shifting it to someone else, and in most cases, that will come back to you right. The pipes got to back up. So you have to optimize first. And with optimization, what I’m really talking about with most people is tracking because there’s so much going on in our lives, so many inputs, so much stuff, and a lot of the overwhelm that people experience is because they just don’t know what’s causing the overwhelm. So if you start to track things, and whether it’s how many emails you sent yesterday, how many steps you took today, how much sleep you got, what you ate, how many phone calls you made, and how long they lasted, like all of this stuff that we do now can be tracked pretty much automatically, and even if you don’t do anything with that information, just tracking it, it has been proven to be really powerful in terms of giving us back a little element of control. Hopefully, what you do with that information is start to identify how you were actually spending your time, your money, your energy, your resources, and then look at the processes that you’re going through to see areas that you can make more efficient. The second part of automation is really my playground now, because so many things can be automated today, we we can automate things now for free, in many cases that three months ago, a person had to do. It’s just fascinating what technology has done for us. So you optimize for us, then you automate what automate what you can and then if there’s anything left over, that’s the first time you look at outsourcing it to a specialist or generalist of some kind.

Host
In terms of measuring like, what are, what are some of the common things that you see or you find that you go these. These are the things that people are doing that are causing them overwhelm that they don’t realize are causing them overwhelm?

Ari Meisel
So there’s two sides to that equation. Right on the one side, you have the day to day stuff that just annoys people, you know, like making lunch, making school lunch every day. That’s something that’s just, you know, it’s difficult, especially for people who are nine to five jobs. It’s stressful. It really is. And I have three young boys, and I. Do it. We do it every day, but it’s also something that definitely can be made more efficient, and there are ways to do that. Paying bills, those are the kinds of things that almost everybody has experience with. How you commute to work is something that can be made more efficient, whether it’s not necessarily the route, but there’s a lot of things you can do while you are in transit that people don’t necessarily think that they can get done especially like, for example, you could have a virtual assistant do all your email with you on the phone while you’re driving, which is totally fine. You could dictate an entire book if you wanted to while you were driving. You know, there’s all sorts of things that you can get done in a commute. I mean, and a lot of people, that’s a really effective strategy. But then there’s the other side of it. There’s the really big projects that people wrongly assume have to be done by them so they’ll never get done. And they assume that because, like, who could possibly do this? But what they don’t realize is that there are tons of services or tons of ways to get that done. My father is a great example. I was having dinner with him last night, and he was saying that he’s got this collection of photographs that he’d really like to sell. He’s like, but I have to photograph him. And then I was like, Dad, we can have literally two people come and do that whole thing for you, from the photographing it to the cataloging, to the putting it on eBay to the shipping. I was like, you can just say, do it, and I can get this done with no effort on either of our parts. And it’s so it’s that kind of thing too, where people just, they just don’t and it’s not their fault. They’re just not aware of the fact that there are these services and there’s people that are available to do this stuff for you.

Host
So I want to talk to you about the world of virtual assistants. Tell us, like, what do we need to know about them? Where are they? How do you use them? What do you use them for?

Ari Meisel
Okay, so it’s great question. I’ll tell you what the industry looked like and what there is now. So the landscape, as it was, was there were two kinds of virtual assistants, and I’ve been a huge, huge fan of virtual assistant services for a long time. I’ve tested 23 of them over the last five years, and learned a lot, obviously, from doing that. I actually think that everybody should work with a virtual assistant at some point, especially if you’re in a nine to five job or a corporate environment, because it’s a learning experience for you in terms of how you effectively communicate and delegate the things that you want done. So there are two kinds of virtual assistants. There’s the on demand assistant, which is the, well, actually, I’ll start with the other one. There’s a dedicated assistant, which is fairly straightforward. It’s where you’re dealing with one person, and they get to know you and and, by the way, just to define virtual assistant, it’s really just an assistant who isn’t in the room with you. That’s basically what it means. It could be across the across town, or across the globe. And historically, five years ago, I’d say, if you really, if you wanted a virtual assistant, you went to India. That was just the way it was. There was companies like ask Sunday you had Friday tasks, today tasks every day. There was a bunch of them. And that was the place. But now it’s the last place that I would want to get a virtual assistant from, because the labor market for virtual assistants there just got completely flooded, and the quality went down quite a bit, which, by the way, is an interesting observation on outsourcing in general. Because if you want to go to India for outsourcing now, SEO is great where, and this stuff shifts around, like if you want to get graphic design done now, Eastern Europe is fantastic. Poland is great for programmers right now, and Costa Rica is fantastic for call centers. But that wasn’t the case two years ago. And I don’t know why that is, but I just see these things if you if you do want to go out of country for virtual assistant now, most people would go to the Philippines. The only problem with that the Filipino language, Tagalog is extremely facial expression based. So when you’re communicating with a native Filipino speaker over email or over a text message or chat, they what happens is they end up taking the instructions very, very literally. So that’s okay, but that usually means that you have to be very specific to with what you’re saying. Fortunately, now you can get virtual assistants that are US based and which is great for a number of reasons. Obviously, you get native us speakers. You get people who have a little bit better cultural context for some of the things that you might have them do. Timezone is the third one. So that’s a dedicated system where you have one person you’re always talking to them, that you can train them. They can learn how you like doing things, who you like to talk to, where you like to go for meetings, all that kind of stuff. The other side of it is what’s known as the on demand virtual assistant, and that would be something like fancy hands, which I do recommend. It’s a great company, and with fancy hands, what you get is access to over 3000 assistants. And you put your task into a pool so you email it or leave a voicemail, and any one of those assistants can pick it up, do it and move on prem. Now, the benefit to that is that it’s usually a lot cheaper, enormously cheaper, to have On Demand assistance. You get 24/7, response time, because there’s always somebody awake that’s ready to do something. You get much faster response time. Typically within 10 minutes, you’ll have somebody on something, and you get people from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets, the downside is that they’re limited to tasks that take less than 20 minutes, because, you know, it just that’s the way it is. There’s no continuity. So if you’re not good at describing your tasks, then you’re going to have an issue. They can’t make big purchases for you. So what we have now, which is the let’s do us, is a hybrid. We. Basically have a dozen assistants working with us right now, and what you get when you work with us is access to the whole team. And because they are trained in less doing methodology, they can you can work with that team as if it was working with a dedicated assistant. So every time they do tasks for clients, they’re helping create those processes and optimize them. They’re adding information to a very detailed client dossier, so that even if somebody were to quit or get sick or move on whatever, then it doesn’t matter, because we’ve created all this knowledge base on how to work with that client. And of course, that information is transferable to other clients. So what that means is that we actually are more like on demand project managers, because you could never tell a virtual assistant produce a podcast. That’s just way too big of a thing. We can do that. So what we’re trying to, what I’ve been basically trying to position this as, is something that the market is missing, where people can say what they want done and we figure out the rest, so they don’t have to know how to hire people or what the best resource is to get particular aspects done, we can do that.

Host
What kind of cost range are you looking for? For this kind of thing?

Ari Meisel
Typically with the Philippines, you’re looking at between eight and $20 an hour, and you have to look at, obviously, a cost benefit analysis in terms of quality of the labor and the skill set that you’re getting. And you know, if somebody’s a quarter of the price, but it takes them four times as long, or they have to redo it four times. That’s obviously a problem.

Host
The question is, how much rework is has to be done? How much training, just the fear that somebody else who doesn’t work in my company every day is going to actually be able to do this effectively.

Ari Meisel
Well and see that, which is one of my favorite things to do for people, because I have taken I’ve never seen a process that I could not systematize in a way that somebody could do it without any training. And I mean that, you know, so from very, very complex processes, too, it’s really just a matter of breaking it down to its most basic chunks and automating as much as possible, by the way, so that there is no that, you know, we don’t even have to worry about human involvement that could possibly mess up something, and then the stuff that’s left to actually be done by a human is not stupefied, but it’s really just made into a checklist that is easy enough to follow. And doctors, surgeons and pilots, who have done procedures 1000s of times, still use checklists so that they don’t miss things. Proper delegation is when you effectively communicate your needs to somebody to the extent that they can take it and run with it to the point of being able to overcome certain hurdles on their own without having to come back to you so that you can go back to doing what you do best and not managing that person.

Host
Interesting. Let’s just talk about the inbox. That’s the big, mammoth beast that everyone struggles with and creates the stress for the professional world, and you have the Inbox Zero plan.

Ari Meisel
Yeah, absolutely. So really simple, three Ds. You can only deal with an email once, and this, and it’s one of the three Ds. The first one is to delete it because it’s not relevant or doesn’t require a response. And I would tell you that 40% of the emails that people respond to don’t actually require a response. If you’ve ever found yourself sending an email that said, thanks, or great, don’t The second is to deal with it. If you can deal with something in the next three minutes, deal with it right now, because there won’t be a magical three minutes later. And I don’t mean click it, mark it unread and be like, Okay, I’ll come right back to it. No. Deal with it right now. That could include a little subset D, which will be delegating it so you can pass that off to an assistant or a spouse or a coworker, and the third one is the most interesting. So if you can’t delete it and you can’t deal with it right now, then you need to defer it to a time that you can more effectively deal with it. And for that, I recommend something called Follow up.cc so you can forward that email to 8pm at follow up.cc or Thursday at follow up.cc or one week at follow up.cc whatever time period you think might make the most sense for you to actually be able to effectively deal with that, and it will then come back to your inbox at that time so that you can and the most effective time to deal with it is not just because you have free time. It’s also because you are maybe in a better state to do that, or because you have more information, or whatever it might be, and that’s basically the strategy.

Host
Well Ari, I think where do you want people to go to connect and learn more about you and all the different things that you have going on?

Ari Meisel
They can just go to lessdoing.com, they can find out about the podcast, the book, the blog, everything is there.

Host
Well, Ari, keep inspiring people and keep preaching the good word, my friend.

Ari Meisel
Always a pleasure to talk to you.