How To Achieve More By Doing Less with Michael Hyatt

On this week’s podcast I am interviewing the amazing Michael Hyatt. As a New York Bestselling author, we are talking all about his book ‘Free to Focus’. We’re going to be talking all about how we can become more productive without having to increase the time that we have. The episode is going to be sharing a mix of simple mindset practices and various different hacks to help you become more productive, because who doesn’t need to know how to do that? Filled with lots of incredible information, you’re going to want to grab a notebook for this one!

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• The Hustle Fallacy is the idea that you in order to achieve more you have to do more. In reality, not all tasks, not all meetings and not all opportunities are created equal. Focussing on the things that really matter is what will REALLY allow you to achieve more.
• There is such thing as a double win, where you can win at work and succeed at life. You just need to have that balance.
• You are the most important asset your company has and if you don’t look after your energy levels, your business is going to suffer. Because of this, nutrition is important. If you know a food is likely to slow you down, try to avoid it.
• When you’re taking time off, whether it is for a vacation or a weekly break, make sure you’re not doing any work at all.
• There are three steps to becoming more productive, the first one is to stop. Whilst it may seem counterproductive, you need to stop and see where your productivity lies. Ask yourself the hard questions. Has your smartphone made you less productive? Do productivity hacks give you the life you want?
• Evaluate the tasks that you’re doing. Think about the tasks you have completed over the past two weeks and evaluate whether or not you were passionate about it and whether or not you were proficient.
• Outsourcing your work is a great way to increase your productivity, as well as your income.
• If you know you enjoy something, you need to do everything you can to ensure you’re doing more of it. If you’re not enjoying something, you need to eliminate it.
• If you don’t want to say yes to something, you need to follow this simple hack. First of all, you need to affirm the person asking in your initial response. Once you have affirmed their work, you need to pivot. The best thing to say is ‘In order to be faithful to my other commitments, I have to say no’. This is the yes-no-yes formula.
• If you find yourself responding to a lot of requests, consider setting up your yes-no-yes responses as an email signature.
• The 3-by-3 System is where you have 3 goals for the quarter and 3 outcomes per week. Limiting yourself to 3 goals is important, because when your focus is dispersed across too many goals, you’re less likely to achieve any of them.
• If you could only pick three things to do this week to help your business grow, what would they be?
• When it comes to large projects, consider the 10-80-10 rule. This is where you are involved in the first and last 10% of a project to oversee it. You’re the architect, but you don’t have to be the builder.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

The biggest tip when it comes to being focussed and driving results is to ensure you get a good night’s sleep. A well-rested mind will be your most productive mind.

Transcript below

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. I am your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. Welcome, welcome. If this the first episode you listen to, then I am very happy to have you here, and boy, have you chosen an amazing first episode to listen to, because I'm not even going to do hardly any intro, we're going to go straight in, because I am so excited about this episode, because on today's podcast I am interviewing the amazing Michael Hyatt.

Now this guy has been in business a very long time. He is a New York best-selling author, I'll give you his proper bio in a bit, but basically today we are talking all around his book, Free To Focus, which is all about how as business owners and CEOs we manage our time, how we become more productive without necessarily just pushing to do more within the time we've got, and honestly, it is full of so much good information. It's a mix of the mindset stuff alongside with some really practical, cool hacks how you can save more time and become more productive. And let's face it, who on earth does not need that?

The other thing that I love about this and about Michael is the fact that he talks about taking naps and how good they are for us, and how crucial they can be in business. So, I am a massive fan of taking naps. I love a nap, because let me just add the caveat of I don't sleep very well for whatever reason. I often wake up, my brain doesn't stop working, and it's like constantly giving me things to think about in the middle of the night. Anyway, I love a nap but I was always too fearful to ever say anything through embarrassment, because I thought it made me sound lazy and that it wasn't good that I was taking a nap in the day when I'm running this successful business, blah, blah, blah.

However, he has assured me that it's a very good thing. So anybody who tells me taking naps is good, I just think they're amazing straight off, anyway. But like I said, today's episode is jam-packed full of stuff. But if you haven't heard of Michael before, which I'm sure you have, then let me tell you a bit about him. Michael Hyatt is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Michael Hyatt & Company. He has scaled multiple companies over the years including $250 million publishing company with 700-plus employees, and his own Leadership Development Company that has grown over 60%, year-on-year, for the past four years. Under his leadership, Michael Hyatt & Company has been featured in Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America for two years in a row.

He's the author of several New York Times and Wall Street Journals and U.S. Today's best-selling books. His books include Platform, Living Forward, Your Best Year Ever, Free to Focus, and I have to say, having read some of his books, they are great. Really, really good books. He is also, and I say this on the episode, he's got a great voice so I do listen to him on Audible as well, and he comes across really well. But he enjoys what he calls the double win with his wife of 40 years, his five daughters and nine grandchildren. So he has got a busy, busy life, but you know what? As you're going to discover from this episode, he manages to get that balance with everything, so, honestly, I think you're going to learn a whole lot from him today. I was so very honoured to have him on. He's a very busy man and I'm very privileged that he agreed to come on to the podcast, so I hope you enjoy this one.

So, I am very honoured to welcome the amazing Michael Hyatt to the podcast. Welcome, Michael.

Thank you, Teresa. I'm delighted to be on with you.

Honestly, I am very, very grateful that you found the time. I know you're a very busy man and I know that my audience are going to love what you have to say, and get so many good takeaways from this episode, so I'm very excited. But, just in case, it is a just in case, because I'm sure my audience have heard of you, could you just briefly tell us how you got to do what you do today and have these amazing books and do this business that you have today?

Well, I spent most of my career in the book publishing world. Most recently as the CEO and the Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers which began as a British company in Edinburgh in 1798. Now, I wasn't at the company quite that long, but when I was like the seventh CEO in the company, and so I decided in 2011, we sold the company to HarperCollins publishers, and I decided it was now or never. I was going to launch out and become an author and speaker which had been my dream thing for a long time, and I'd been in business for myself before, before I was at Thomas Nelson, and I said it was time to become an entrepreneur again, but I did that.

So I had started blogging, believe it or not, back in 2004. I broke my ankle, and I decided while I was laid up after I had surgery on it, that I would take on this thing called blogging, and so I was pretty consistent at it for years and years and years, and to this present day, but that had created enough of a platform that when I left Thomas Nelson I was able to write a book on it, which was my book Platform: Get Noticed In A Noisy World. That book went on to become a New York Times best seller and I was able to create a membership site called Platform University based on that, and everything else happened as a result of that.

So, today, we have 40 full-time employees. We're really focused at Michael Hyatt & Company on leadership development today, so we have that extensive coaching programme for entrepreneurs, we have some physical products like the Full Focus Planner, and just an array of suite of products.

I love that. And it's really interesting, that, one, you came from a job, if you like, and then obviously went into being an entrepreneur, and also, what I love about where you are now today, is the fact that you came from a fairly traditional corporate background. The stuff that you talk about today, for me, seems like you've taken a big leap in the sense of how you are and what you promote, and the life you lead and the balance that you have, because actually I don't know about you, but I worked in corporate world for quite a while, and actually some of the things that you now promote in terms of becoming a good leader, I don't think they were around, you know. I worked for Land Rover, I was in their head office in the U.K. and I don't think those things existed back when I was there maybe 10 years ago.

So, it's interesting that you have been a corporate, and now you're promoting all these amazing things. Did you get any of that from working in corporate? Was it a great corporate place to work, or...

Well, it was kind of mixed. I mean, you learn a lot from bad examples. In fact, I think sometimes you learn more from bad examples. I certainly worked for some leaders that weren't great, and I was inspired by that to try to find a different way. At Thomas Nelson, when I arrived there back in 1998, I wasn't really excited about the culture. I felt like the culture was toxic, and one of the things I did as a mid-level manager was, I said, "Well, I can't really change the world above me but I think I can change the world below me and have some impact on the culture."

So I set out to be very intentional about creating a company culture for our division, and then it was kind of contagious because one of my contentions about culture is that it drives operating results, it's the unseen force that drives operating results, and so it started driving our operating results. The division I was running was the 14th division and out of 14 divisions in the company, we were the worst performing. We had zero revenue growth. We were losing money, terrible company morale. But in 18 months we went from number 14 to number one, and as a result of that people wanted to know, "Gosh, what are you doing over there?"

And so, a lot of it was having to do with the culture and leadership and some of the things actually I talked about in Free To Focus about productivity.

Yeah. And the other thing I must mention, I was very lucky, when I came over to Nashville, I actually went to your office and I put it on Insta story and I actually wrote, "This is better than my house." Your office is phenomenal. It's so-

Thank you.

... beautiful, and it just... From where you're coming from and the talking about culture and things, you have created something where surely your team must be absolutely in heaven to go to work. It's such an amazing environment for them.

Well, I really see my team as a stewardship responsibility for me. I have a responsibility to take care of them and what really gets me excited is creating an awesome working environment where they can discover their strengths, where they can work in their zone of genius, we call it the desire zone in my book Free To Focus, but we try to say, "Okay, if we're going to build an amazing company that's going to grow and really scale sustainably, what kind of environment do we have to create to attract those A-level players? And so, I remember my daughter, Megan and I, I don't know that you met Megan, I know you met Mary-

Yes. No, I didn't meet Megan. No, I didn't. No. I met Marissa, I think.

Ah, she's my youngest.

Yes. That was it.

Megan's my oldest and she's also the COO of Michael Hyatt & Company, but she and I went away for a day and we said, "Okay, how can we create this amazing environment for our employees?" So, get this. This is where we started. We said, "Let's approach this like anything in marketing. So, let's create a sales page. So, if we're going to create a sales page that's going to really attract and convert the best employees, the best prospective employees to become employees, what kind of benefits would we have to have?"

I mean, we were thinking almost like when you sell a programme and you create bonuses, and we thought, "Okay, so what are the benefits have to be?" And so we came up with some crazy stuff on that page, and we give our employees a 30-day paid sabbatical after three years. We give them unlimited PTL, they can choose to be off whenever they want to be off, they can work from wherever. We have generous paternity leave provisions and all that, so that all just came out of that desire to create a place that would attract the right people.

And that's wonderful because, like you, I've worked in mixed places. Some places that were nice, some places that were just horrendous culture and terrible morale, and they treated their team like absolute dirt. They were terrible. And I remember, in this one company I worked for, I had a team under me and a bit like you, I thought, "There's nothing I can do about that, but this I can." And I realised that my team who were doing the work, if we didn't look after them and treat them nice and appreciate them and focus our attention on them, then they wouldn't do a good job and we wouldn't have a service to sell.

So, for me, the onus of the business and the people who run it got it all completely wrong. It was like they treated those people like they were no one, and they treated the directors like they were everything, and it's like, "But what if tomorrow they all decide they're going to do a terrible job, because you haven't got a business left if that's the case."

No. That's right. In fact, I often say to my people and when I'm out speaking to CEOs and business owners, I say, "Look, your first job is to take care of your people. If you take care of your people, your people will take care of your customers, and if they take care of your customers, the customers will take care of you. And don't ever get that backwards."

Yes. No. You're right. That's awesome. Such good advice. So, I said today I want to talk about Free To Focus, your book that I've read. Well, I've read a few, but it's in this one, for me was a really good standout book that I think my audience are going to love hearing about, because when you start a business, and I made this huge mistake. So I started my business, and I go, "How hard can this be?" How naïve was I? And I thought, "I've been in marketing for 15 years. I know marketing like the back of my hands. I can do this. This bit's easy." But what I didn't appreciate was what it's like to run a business because I'd never run a business, and how do I manage myself?

I could have all the best tools and hacks and everything in the world, but if I wake up in a day and I don't feel like doing that work, or if I get overwhelmed and then I can't focus on anything, the impact on my business that I have personally is obviously massive, and what was so great about the book is, it turns a lot of stuff on its head in terms of how we think we're trying to be productive, and how we think we're trying to manage our time effectively, and actually we're doing the complete opposite. So, can we start by just looking at, what are the myths that business owners and CEOs and people get wrong when they're trying to, or they think they're trying to, be super productive?

Yeah. I think one of the biggest one is, they fall prey to what I call the hustle fallacy. And this is the idea that if you want to achieve more you have work more. And the entire premise of the book, in fact, the subtitle of the book is A Total Productivity System for Achieving More by Doing Less.

Yeah.

And I think not all tasks, not all meetings, not all opportunities are created equal. And I think the sooner that we realise that, the more we can focus on those high leverage activities or meetings or opportunities that really drive the results, so that we can have a life and a business, because I've seen so many business owners burn out when they bought into the hustle fallacy. They're working 70, 80 hours a week, and there's so many people out there, so many business gurus that are out there teaching that, and what they don't see is when people have a health crisis or they blow out their most important relationships, they go through a crisis in their marriage or their kids aren't talking to them any more.

And I just think none of that has to happen. I'm after what I call the double win where you can win at work and succeed at life, so that "and" is very important. But that does require that we think about work differently and set as a goal, I think, that we're going to achieve more by actually doing less and focusing on the things that really matter and letting the rest go.

Yeah. And the other thing I love particularly about this, and you, generally, in terms of how you put yourself across on your message, is that balance, is that it's not just about all your focus is on work, all your focus is on building a business, all your focus is that... It's the fact that you talk about your wife and your children and your grandchildren, and you take a long holiday, you take a sabbatical, don't you, every year.

I do.

And how long are you away for, when you do that?

30 days, every year. I've done that since the very first year I started, because, part of that, Teresa, was because I didn't want to build a business that was so dependent upon me that it couldn't run without me.

Yeah.

And I've often thought that if the business can't run without me, I'm really not an owner, I'm just an operator and basically I have a job, and I'm probably working for the most onerous, most intense, most demanding boss I've ever worked for, and that's... That's me.

Yeah. Honestly. And like you said, that's the thing. We set up these businesses, and one of the first books or one of books I read very early on which really helped me shift a bit with this, I owe you big because I think you have to have lots of impact and different things, was the E-Myth Revisited. Is that-

Oh, I love that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Michael Gerber.

Yeah. And he talks about the fact of, we are basically just setting up our businesses to have a job, and if we're not in it, it doesn't exist. So, how do we set up the business, exactly what you said, in order to then come out of the business?

The other thing that you talk about, which I think is amazing in terms of this balance, because like you said, the hustle culture, and especially when you look at some of the more guru-esque type of...