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.