Hello and welcome to the Virtual Frontier Podcast, about virtual Teams created by a virtual Team. Disclaimer, all of our interviews are conducted virtually. I'm Daniel your host and I'm part of the team here to Virtual Frontier. Today's topic of our Q&A session is Work less Accomplish more, the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss in perspective. The author, entrepreneur and investor Tim Ferris got worldwide recognized for his bestselling book, The Four Hour Work Week. But what lies behind this lifestyle design, and how can we escape the permanent pressure and stress at work? Why is the right Mindset and finding my passion so important? Let's see how Manuel as a CEO and founder has adapted this concept to his personal lifestyle and what insights we can get. If you'd like to show subscribe on YouTube, review it on Radio Public, follow us on Spotify, Stitcher, Audible, Google, Podcast, or any other platform you use to enjoy podcasts. You can also engage with our community on Discord. All the links you can find below in the description. So without further ado, let's dive into the third season of Q&A session at the Virtual Frontier. Enjoy the conversation.

Hello, Manuel. Thank you for joining us today on our new Q&A episode, I'm glad you are here. Our topic for today is speaking a little bit about some getting work done in less time. We had as a our source and based of our conversation, the book of Tim Features The four hour work week, which is quite interesting and has evolved over the last couple of years. And I would like to ask you probably first, how much time do you spend per week doing your work and doing your tasks? Are you more in the four hours or 60 hours range and how you define that for yourself or what is work you love to do and probably other tasks that you might delegate?

Yeah, that's a good question. I am also happy to talk about this. And so we have to differentiate because I run two businesses. The one is Bright Solutions. That's the one I founded in two thousand six. That's a service provider for digital projects, software development and marketing, and the other one is Flash Hub. So at Bright Solutions I would say I work three hours per day, which is the 10 to 15 hours per week, sometimes less. But I was able to reduce that dramatically because back in 2011/12 even till 2018, when I didn't had a strong, flexible team, I was working for sure 12 to 14 hours every day just in this single business. And yeah, nowadays I lead it with a I would say three hours per day. And at Flash Hub I spend the majority of my time because that's the business I'm currently building up. I hope other leaders, other entrepreneurs basically achieve the same build a business that can run independently from them.

So what I like to do is exactly this. I love to support people. I love to support people that want to grow. And that applies to both my team at Bright Solutions as well as clients at Flash Hub.

How do you really define this four hour week, because as far as I understood it, it's not so much about like getting really down to the four week, four hours per week. It's more about the Mindset, right.

I mean, for me, doesn't matter how much I work, as long as I do activities that I really enjoy and where I see progress. I don't I don't care, I can work the whole day if if it inspires me, if I get success from what I do, if I see progress and how it impacts other people positively, I love that, right. But I want to be free in a way to decide when I want to work, where I want to work with whom I want to work. So that is the definition of freedom. And that's what is more important for me than having just a four hour work week.

Yeah, and one or a couple of important key aspects on this four hour work week or let's say spend more time effectively and efficiently on what you are doing, are four elements. First is the definition. Then we have an elimination, automatization and liberation. So there are four aspects and I would like to dive a little bit into a few on each of those so you can explain your own perspective on that. I'm talking about the definition of of your work and how work is probably done in your team. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, that's I think, the most important part to get right, when you want to reduce Workflow. Let me let me go first to the symptoms. Why so many people have to work so many hours every day and why that gets more and more with Remote work and technology. And yeah, because these things just speed up the workload. It's not getting less, it's just more efficient. And then there is more work because technology speeds up things and how things change. So yeah, that can be a real hamster wheel. And I mean, most people would say yes to the statement that they spend eight to 12 hours per day in video Calls and that most of this time is a waste of time because every day we are invited to video Calls or the result of a video Calls nothing, just another video call. And they jump from video to video called a video call. They are just driven by endless meetings. They are not consciously deciding about what matters for them to reach their goals. They just react to what others want from them. So if this is the scenario you are in, it's really hard because you are obviously not in control of your own time. If you are just driven by others reacting to what others want from you, there's no way to reduce your workload because it's not under your control. I mean, you can get the control back by saying no more often. Well, knowing that most successful people, they say no more often than they say yes, because saying no to something means strengthening your commitment to what you said yes to.

OK, that is the first important thing. Instead of reacting every day, reacting to emails, to phone calls, to check messages, to any kind of communication, which typically comes in when other people think they need to talk to you and then you get interrupted and disturbed, become the manager of your own time by leading others how they should communicate with you. You can use timeboxes, you can use structured communication by forcing people into a structure where they really think about what they want from you. And while we had the last Podcast about this, while they start writing down their message very often, they already found the solution. And this way of structuring your own work to manage and structure your own time and not allowing everyone to interrupt you any time, I think this is the first most important part. You need to get this done even before thinking just about a four hour work week. Because if you are just in an environment that doesn't respect your time, no way to do that. Now, if you are an entrepreneur or a business owner, basically you are in the situation to manage your own time. But if you look at reality, most business owners are not the master of their own time. They work far more than their employees. They are driven far more by more people, even by their team, by clients. They are the person in the middle and everyone wants something from them continuously. That's a hamster wheel. And I recommend to really break that, introduce structured communication, introduce asynchronous communication and manage who can interrupt you and when. So that's the fundamental thing number one.

Now, we already touched a little bit on the elimination part as you have mentioned, getting rid of those parts that are obstacles and put all in this hamster wheel. What is important or how do you start with this elimination process, if you have a lot of tasks, a lot of things in your day that are not really helpful, they're are not getting you anywhere and that doesn't help you to get your goals.

So the last word you said is what matters your goals, because, I mean, if you want to be successful by building your business, if you want to be successful in your shop, for your manager, for the business, you're working, whatever you need to understand first your purpose. Why are you here? If you can't complete the sentence? I am working in this business so that, you don't know why you are here, and if you don't know why you are here, you might be busy all day, but your contribution might not lead you towards your goals.

So knowing your purpose and then know your goals and goals need to be expressed in numbers. If you don't know your purpose, you don't know your goals and how to measure them and make progress transparent. Obviously, you don't know where you are. And if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, OK, and reaching goals is all about setting focus. If you don't know where to focus on, it's hard to get better. It's like driving a car with close eyes. OK, that's deadly. Nobody will do that. And if you just work and you are busy but you don't know why you are here and what's your goal and how to measure it, it's very similar. It's deadly. That's why many people are going to burn out because they just driven by others and have no idea why they are doing this. Now, once you understood this, what you can do is write down your role, OK. Writing down your purpose, writing down your goals and how you measure how well you progress towards these goals. That is the first thing. Once you've written that down, you want might want to set expectations and get feedback from others. For example, if you work with a team that need your input, if you have a boss or a miniature that depends on your output, go to them and say, look, this is my understanding of my job role. What you agree on that or something you want to at related to my goals, my purpose. Do you see things differently? And then shape that role up until it's really clear. Now, once that is defined, next thing you can do is you go through your day to day activities over the last three to six weeks and you reflect on which activities you did every day and write them down and how much time you spend on them. And the third column, oK? First Callum's activity, second column is the time you spend on these activities on average per week, third column is your goals and then you have a mapping of your activities and how they contribute to your goals.

And very often you might find that you are doing things that have nothing, nothing to do with your goals. Now then there are two things. Either you simply stop doing these things because it makes no sense, because they don't contribute to your goal or you delegate them. You delegate them to a person that has the purpose of the role to do these kind of activities and where these activities help the person achieve their goals. OK, that's like, for example, I as a CEO, I need to care about the strategy and the business. I need to care about a happy team and happy clients. But my KPI's not to bring new sales to the business. That's part of sales. Now, if I'm involved every day to help sales people close deals, obviously I'm doing work for them. It's not my purpose. It's not my contribution. I mean, I help them if they ask me, but I won't accept doing their work because simply they are just too lazy to do the Calls or write the proposals or whatever it is. OK, that and that is a very important thing. You don't want to push any kind of work back and just say no, but you can say no and provide an alternative that's always OK, because that still helps people to get their problem solved. So either I mean, if you if you have no track of activities and how important these activities are, it's hard to it's hard to eliminate what's not effective. So you need to have this list. I can just recommend to really track your activities and the time you spend and then you have transparency and then you can manage your activities. Otherwise, it's just a best guess. And this won't get you any better results. Just disappointed people because you changed your behavior and nobody knows why.

And once you get this clarity on this task, which I find really interesting, having this analyzed and getting reflective about what you will really doing all day and all week and having like maybe a real map out laying on in front of you and seeing that over a course of two or three weeks or months, you can and see what is really happening there. When this is done and you have started of elimination, you could also go in the next step with the automatization. Tell us a little bit more more about that.

Yes, well, the steps to automate things is first to structure them. And we did that right. First, you need to structure your activity. So what are you doing? OK, what is it. Then you need to understand how you do it, OK? And once you did that, you can systemize it. For example, if you are sales person and you do create proposals every day, you have Calls with potential clients that tell you something. You create a proposal, send it out, then they don't reply. You follow up manually and then they call you. You are not available or you call the back. And that's that's unstructured communication that creates a mess all over the place. But if you don't know how your sales process should work, OK, from I have a first discovery call. I write down my information that I need in a very clear form that asks me precise questions so that I get the information from my client to sell something. Because if I don't know the problem from the client, what they want to achieve, their goals, their fears, their aspirations, I cannot make a compelling proposal. OK, I need this information. So having a form that leads me as a sales person through the process of interviewing a client and getting this information is the first step to structure an interview and to systemize the first contact with the client. Now, once you have this form, you can create a proposal where you simply take the learnings and the answers from the client and add them to the proposal. That's the next step. And then you can create a follow up email sequence once you sent them out to the client so that you don't have to do this manually. But Tools like HubSpot, they can send as many emails as until somebody replies, for example. But if you don't understand how this goes and how it should goes, there is no way to automate it. We are also faced with like installing another tool, using another tool that just creates more chaos, more complexity, but won't make you more effective. Because tools just make things more efficient. But if you do, if you are doing the wrong things. You can use a tool, but then simply make the wrong things more efficient. That's not what you want. So structuring your your work, then systemize your work with forms, with Workflows clearly really understanding how the flow of information should go, then you can digitize it. And once you did that, you can automated. And for example, when we're talking about sales or marketing, this is when sales funnels come into play. Sales funnel is a is a step by step guidance from website to website with videos and forms that let your client from one step to another until the person becomes a real paying client, without any sales involvement. But if you don't know how your sales process works, you cannot automated. You can send out emails, but this won't get you any results. You can run Facebook and LinkedIn and Google ad campaigns. You will waist a lot of money, but you won't get results.

So before you automate, make sure you digitize it, before you digitize, make sure you systemise it, before you systemising make sure you structure and understand what you want.

Right, which brings us to the last part of this four elements the liberation, and I would like to ask what can be actually like found to be more efficient and effectively about your work and assuming you have already done the first three steps and getting those elements right.

Sorry, I have one question back to you. What is really what is a liberation? I don't know. These were liberation.

Liberation.

So what is that about being free. Yes. Freeing up your time. Be more free. OK, got it. Yeah. I mean. Isn't it the ultimate freedom for a person to be able to decide to what you want to work, when you want to work, with whom you want to work? And once you are not in that hamster wheel of constant meetings being driven by others, just just a bundle of reactions, right? You are just reacting to circumstances, reacting to messages. You're not consciously deciding yourself what you do. I mean, that's all I would say that's the definition of slavery, right? If you have no conscious choice about your own time and no intention about what you want to do, you're just acting when others asked you to act. And I never want to go back to this because I love freedom, my life, love, self-determination, independence and yeah, structuring work and leading others how they should interact with you got me a lot of time free, got me a lot more effective and efficient and allowed me basically to have work and life that supports each other instead of being a conflict of each other. Because when you come home from work you are so exhausted as you're constantly just driven by others. And you know, it's not the others to blame. Of course, people come to me and Manuel can you, Manuel can you, you get what you tolerate. If I accept this. OK, I just train people to behave like this because obviously they see it works. Now, if I always say no, people won't see me as a team player anymore and they don't like to engage, work, interact with me anymore if I'm always just defensive. But if I'm defensive, I say no and help the person find an alternative that's a good thing. And yeah, that that contributes to what I want to achieve at work. I want to support other people, want to make them successful, both my clients and my team. And I want to be able to decide about my activities to be the owner of my own time.

We have just mentioned it also in the entrance that the team aspect on, because in another part, also the tasks many business owners and you just mentioned in the entrance are always in the center of the action. Like every every everything comes to them right on. Assuming you're having the right team setting, how do you find out who really belongs in your team and how did you work towards this goals and finding out how and who belongs to your team?

You mean how I select people that I want to have in my team?

Yes.

So another thing, how to find out who's really fitting into your team.

OK, yeah, there are two things, right. The first thing is cultural fit. So they need to they need to fit into our culture. And culture is defined by behavior. And behavior is what basically behavior is, how we react to different circumstances every day. OK like, for example, if I asked you to do something and you just say no, I would say this is not a cultural fit because our culture is to support each other. If you just say yes, I would also say that might not be cultural fit because you might say yes to everything. And that lowers your commitment to what you initially said yes to. Because if you always say yes to more and more and more, there will be a point where you can't keep all your commitments, but maybe you don't even tell that because you are afraid of saying no. So this kind of first behavior determines if you are a cultural fit or not. The next thing is to have a fit for the skills that are required to cover the accountability and responsibility of the role you're working in.

And these two components, they help to understand if the person is a fit or not. Now, you can do an initial assessment with a person, but very often if you have people that do create assessments, you have people that know how to do assessments. Well, that doesn't mean that this person is a cultural fit. You will typically see that after I would say a month or so. And then, yeah, it's a decision of both parties if they want to stay and continue working with each other or not. And once you have the cultural fit, I mean, you can always train and learn new skills, but the cultural fit is essential. Otherwise, if you have completely different values, you will apply different behaviors every day. And if everyone behaves differently and they are not aligned and don't have the same understanding of of their core values, then it's hard. Then you build a team that works against each other instead of pulling the same group. And by the way, let me let me add one extension to structure in systemizing digitizing and then automating your work, Remote work opened the door to do this for everyone. Because when you are in an office, there is no way to do this if you are sitting in a room with three to five to even more other people. I mean, they can do with you what they want, they can always interrupt you, you can say no, but still you were interrupted, OK? And if everyone does that, can you help me this? Can you help me that? Can you hand me this? I know this like two years three years ago when we were sitting in office. That was that happens all the time. I came into the office.

We had a long corridor. I was walking along the corridor to my office. And then every door I passed door opened at Manuel. By the way, I have a question and it took me sometimes forty five minutes to get to my office. That's totally crazy. Then I was totally stressed when I came there because I was forty five minutes late. And people, they didn't mean this with disrespect, but it was disrespect of my time so others could do and ask me whatever I want and I had no chance to escape. Now, with Remote work, you can simply switch off all communication channels and focus on what you want to do. Now, I would just recommend and that's how I do it, I have a focus timebox of one hour maximum and then I open my communication channels and reply to people. But then I only do this like maximum 20 minutes, close my communication channels and do my focused work again. And people know that I have this one hour rhythm and they get a response from me at least after a day or so. And if I set this expectation to anyone, tell them that I will reply within a day. Expectations are well set. I have my focus, I get less stress and higher performance. And Remote work enables me because I can simply switch off all communication channels. Of course you have to do it. If you don't do it, everything is open again for others to interrupt and disturb you all the time.

It's kind of a new addiction and all the popping up notifications from all the different Tools, but I also tend to get like the most channels, like really switched off and I'm pulling the info and not getting pushed by the notifications all the time. I said, this is really, really helpful. As the Tools are increasing in tendency and the notifications also increase, and if you have like different notifications on all your channels, you probably won't get anything done during the day really focus because there are some notification popping up every minute, right?

Yes, absolutely. And it's it's not just email. It's email. It's Slack, it's Teams, it's WhatsApp, it's LinkedIN, it's your phone. I mean, you go crazy if you allow all communication channels to interrupt you all the time. No wonder that people get stressed out and burned out faster because with that, just interruptions happen faster.

Yeah, and in a lot of business owners and executives and I think every one , or a lot of people find themselves under huge pressure and stress of all day long, and this notification is a part of that, I guess. How do you cope with those probabilities popping up, even even though you have a good set up and everything? But how do you cope with those situations when things get stressful or you feel a lot of pressure by yourself? How do you cope with those kind of situations?

Things don't get stressful because stress is created entirely by you. So you see a situation and you create stress. Why do you create stress? Because you have fear like that something gets terrible in the future or because you need to do something, but something else distracts you and you want to do something, but your focus gets distracted by something else. If that happens all the time that create, that's when you create the stress. So how I deal with that is I simply try to not allow this. I don't allow things to distract me all the time, that's why I have my focus time and communication time separated. Now stress is also created when things happen, not according to your plan. Like, oK, you have a project and you have a plan and this is the budget and a timeline and this and that. And then life comes and things are differently. Now, you might have fear that things get even worse and this has a lot of consequences that creates stress, but this won't solve the problem. So instead of like looking in the future and worrying what could go wrong, just take the current situation, understand it's not good, analyze the problem and fix it without worrying about the future. Do your best now in this single moment, things that you can really influence. Focus on what you can do instead of what could happen in the future. And for me, that reduces a lot of stress because I see I can influence it. I can do things right now to prevent what I fear that I don't need to fear it because I can do it right now. I can prevent it right now.

Yeah just a great input Manuel. I would like us to ask you a last question for today, how has working with a team of global freelancers has changed your life over the last couple of years? And and what what has changed maybe doing the process?

Everything, I mean, that completely changed everything for me. But I think it's not just working with freelancers, but it's accessing people with different experiences that help me to compensate things that I don't know and skills that I don't have. And the same for my team, because if you have a static local team, first of all, you need to care about utilization so that everyone has work, best possibly paid work. And you also need to ensure that the right work comes to the right people, because if somebody should to work where they don't have the right skills or they don't have the right capacity to do this work, they get stressed. You don't get the results. You have no alternative because finding a new person takes three to six months. And now while working with global talent and then it doesn't matter if they are employees or freelancers, you can get access to like skilled people with the capacity you need at your fingertips. I can whenever... like I had many situations where where I thought, I know like how marketing goes or accounting goes, but when I worked with people that really know how to do it, I realized I had no idea. And while working with these people, I learned so much I can really say over the last two years. I learned more than I I ever learned since I founded my business in 2006, simply because I have contacts with so many people whenever I need them. And yeah, that that you never have a lack of talent and you never have a lack of skills, never have a lack of capacity. You can find people in two weeks even faster if you want. Yeah. Just if you want to assess them properly, it takes two weeks. But that's nothing compared to finding people for your local office, restricting yourself with one hundred square kilometers around the office. If the world can be your Talent Pool, you get talent much faster. That's definitely a great thing, no limitations anymore more.

Great, Manuel. Thank you very much for taking the time today. I would say to you next week.

Yeah, thanks for talking to you.

Thank you.

I want to thank you for joining us today and sharing some insights about his work and lifestyle. Wouldn't it be great if we all could get into a Workflow that is actually working for us and not the other way around, be liberated and more focused on things that we really, really want to do? If you want to learn more about how to work with your business at any time and make work better, visit FlashHub.io/start to get free access to the Virtuell business builder training. Learn in this free training how you can build, grow and scale your business with Virtual Teams and global freelancers. You can subscribe to the Virtual Frontier on Podcast GooglePlay, Sitcher Spotify, YouTube over Podcast can be found. And right here you can leave us a review. On behalf of the team here to Virtual Frontier. I want to thank you for listening. So until next episode, keep exploring new frontiers.