5

THE NEW RICH ARSENAL

“Fear is free to create, which is what makes it so profitable.”

—Nathan Latka

My advice in this book boils down to helping you do one core thing: set yourself up to have an unfair advantage against others.

That’s what will get you membership into the New Rich.

By “unfair” I don’t mean dishonest. You’ll just have such a major lead on your peers and competitors that they won’t possibly be able to catch up with you. It will be like they’re trying to wrestle someone two weight classes above them. They’ll have no chance at a win.

But you don’t get that advantage overnight. Aside from taking up the strategies in the surrounding chapters, there are skills you’ll need to master that will get you into that higher weight class.

Don’t worry—I’m not about to bore you with Business 101 crap. You already know most of that stuff, and if you don’t, there are plenty of books that will teach you. The key tactics that the New Rich leverage do involve universal business skills, but they use them in very specific ways to get what they want.

It starts with masterful persuasion. Most people use their persuasion skills, or muscle, in the wrong ways every day. They try to persuade people to do stupid stuff, like getting their boss to give them a better office or their Facebook friends to like a post.

The trick is to use your persuasion muscle for things that directly correlate to freeing up your time. Think about it: freedom is what most of us want. We want control over our own lives. The quickest and easiest way to get that freedom is by persuading others to do things that free up your time.

Once you hit the sweet spot of having others doing the time-consuming stuff, you can focus on generating more cash flow for yourself. There you’ll need the art of negotiation.

Then things really get fun and lucrative. Calendar free, big wins negotiated, you’ll start valuing your time more because it’s all yours. That’s when productivity kicks in. Once you’ve put a higher value on your time, you’ll realize you’re worth $X per hour, or $Y per week. You’ll know what amount of money gets you out of bed. This clarity will help you see what you should focus on today, and why it’s where you should be spending your time.

SHOULD YOU USE FEAR TO SELL?

This is not a crash course on persuasion. But I will share the specific persuasion techniques I used to build incredible wealth at a very young age. I target one thing: fear.

I do this because our emotions drive most of our purchases, and fear is the strongest among them. When we fear something, we’ll do anything to fix the worry. The most profitable salespeople know this and they feed off our fear by selling the fix. Think about it: the reason you bought renter’s insurance, car insurance, and even insurance for your laptop is because you’re afraid of what could, in theory, go wrong.

A lot of people still try to persuade using reason, and it puts them at a major disadvantage. Look at Hillary Clinton. She tried to use rational facts—real facts—to win an election, and lost to someone who used and said what appealed to people’s emotions. You have to go where the emotions go.

This may sound slimy, but it doesn’t have to be. People today are less rational and more emotional than ever, but it’s your decision whether to use that opportunity for good or for bad. Sell a great product and you can profit off fear without the moral dilemma.

The key is to tell a story that taps into fear—one that says, “This could happen to you.” Then sell businesses or consumers the vitamin.

We all take this bait every day. We buy fish oil supplements in case we ever get cancer, a jump starter in case our car ever breaks down, AppleCare in case we break our iPhones, fire extinguishers in case there’s a fire. Look around you right now. You can probably spot at least one item you bought and haven’t touched in the last year because someone made you think, “I need this in case of XYZ.”

I’ve found seven fear principles that are most directly tied to driving sales and cash flow. This is not a definitive list of persuasion tactics. There are plenty of other things you can do to, say, convince your partner to stay with you, or your kid to do his homework. The focus here is on getting people to buy from you, or getting them to do what you want as it relates to cash in and out of your pocket.

When thinking about how your business ties into these, it’s not so much about how you can blatantly use one of these fears to sell your product. Rather, if you understand which fear you’re catering to, you can make sure your messaging reflects that. So if you were selling into Fear of the Unknown, you’d use words and phrases like “hidden,” “clever,” “never before seen” versus selling into Fear of Missing Out with words like “too late,” “few left,” “regret it later,” etc.

Fear of Missing Out: I mentioned earlier that the quickest way to free up your calendar is to get others to do the time-consuming stuff for you. When I’m recruiting someone to join my team I’m subtly using fear-based persuasion—in this case the fear of missing out—to persuade them to work with me. The pitch sounds something like this: “Hey, the company is growing really fast. We launched three months ago, we’re now doing $100K, and we’re going to do a million by the end of the year. I want you in on the ground floor, but in exchange for getting in early we don’t have a huge budget. Can you do this for a little bit cheaper? Can you take this part of my system and handle it so I don’t have to handle it anymore (e.g., podcast editing or data entry on GetLatka.com)?” The message is, “Don’t miss out on this big company I’m building. Get in early.”

It’s the same concept when you’re using fear-based persuasion to drive sales. You see this a ton with conference organizers who say, “There are only ten tickets left, buy today before they’re all out. . . . Buy today before prices go up.” Many digital products will use the “open cart” technique, saying, “Hey, we have an open cart, it closes Friday. Make sure you buy before we close the cart. We don’t know if we’re ever going to open it again.” You can use this tactic on anything that won’t be around forever—an event, an online course happening on specific days, or services you may be offering for a limited time.

Fear of the Unknown: There is huge earning potential when you tap into people’s fear of the unknown. Look at everything from insurance to Band-Aids. Let’s even ignore health insurance for now. Billion-dollar industries have been built around selling insurance for things like your car, home, and phone. Businesses pay for general liability insurance, board insurance, workers’ compensation insurance. Stores offer add-on insurance for everything from toys to refrigerators. Insurance aside, we buy flashlights and batteries in case of blackouts. We stock our bathrooms and glove compartments with first aid kits.

We spend tons of money triggered by what-if thinking. And companies love to heighten those what-if scenarios, those fears. The best advertisers are masters at planting “what if” questions in our heads that we never would have thought of. Once we hear their message, it feels urgent. A Tylenol ad might say, “Heading out on that beach vacation? Don’t forget Tylenol in your pocket to make sure headaches don’t ruin your trip.”

Current events are fodder for new what-if fears, too. Look at security software alone. Vladimir Putin and Russia have been the number one reason that KnowBe4.com has grown revenues of its hacker prevention software. Before Russian hacks took center stage in the 2016 election cycle, KnowBe4 did $20M in sales. They broke $60M in 2017 and saw direct correlations between their revenue growth and any widespread hacks like Target credit card breaches, Chipotle chip reader intrusions, or Russians hacking the US government.

Fear for Your Life: Think every life insurance policy ever sold. Every lawyer offering services around writing wills. Companies today are getting more creative about tapping into this fear, too. Forever Labs sells the ability to store your stem cells for $2K up front and $250 a month. They’d just launched when I interviewed them and had already made $400K in sales. They’re alleviating customers’ fear for their lives by saying, “Hey, if you ever get cancer, we can use your stored stem cells to grow new, clean cells outside of your body and then use them to help you heal.”

Tons of products also tap into our fear for our life: Tracking devices that skiers and snowboarders carry so searchers can find them in a life-threatening situation. Fold-out window ladders in case of fire. Second parachutes designed into skydiving backpacks. Oxygen masks in airplanes.

What’s the first thing you do when you find a spot on your skin and think, “Oh my God, it’s cancer”? You Google it, and sites like WebMD.com pop up. They’re swimming in cash by preying on people’s worry that something is wrong with their body. They also overlap with the next fear. . . .

Fear for Your Health: Many Fear for Your Life ideas also tie into Fear for Your Health. Health insurance speaks for itself. Why am I paying $800 a month for a plan that covers only catastrophic events when the deductible is $1,500 and the out-of-pocket cap is $5K? Because: What if I get cancer? What if I get in a car crash that leaves me debilitated? Millions of us pay to alleviate that what-if fear. That’s why health care is a trillion-dollar industry.

Vitamins and supplements, gym memberships, gym trainers, and protein bars—all tap into our fear for our health, and our life.

You’ll probably find these last three fears most relevant to your work:

Fear of Losing Freedom: The entire market of productivity tools feeds off this fear. Best-selling books like Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek and David Allen’s Getting Things Done also tap into it. We’re afraid of somebody else controlling us—controlling our time, making us work eighty-hour weeks, putting a cap on our earning potential. We want our time back, and we want our freedom back. That’s why you’re reading this book.

Fear of Loneliness: This is why social networks have taken off. They prey on your fear of being lonely by arbitrarily making you feel important with those little red notifications. They make you feel other humans are thinking about you, and it’s been widely argued that those little dopamine hits are not helpful at all.

Selling off the fear of loneliness goes beyond social media, too. Think of all the dating apps. Every one of them taps into our fear as we think, “I’m never going to find a friend,” “I’m never going to find a partner,” or “I’m never going to go on another date.” Then we fire up our apps, hoping to meet someone.

Looking at physical products, one can even argue that makeup companies prey on people’s fear of loneliness. Most people wear makeup to look their best and feel confident. What if you walk out the door not feeling that way? Would you worry that people won’t be as attracted to you or your energy? Makeup companies rely on that fear when they market to you.

Pfizer absolutely makes bank on men’s fear of loneliness by selling Viagra. The same goes for any product that promises to help us physically connect with others, or feel confident and create sexual energy—colognes and perfumes, hair products, lingerie, teeth whitening kits. . . .

Fear of Failure: This is such a universal feeling that everything from software to shoes can tap into our fear of failure. Say you decide to run a triathlon with your friends. You want to make sure you have the right shoes so you don’t get blisters or twist your ankle while running for eighteen miles. So you just do it—you buy the best shoes out there. If you’re launching a business you might spend thousands to alleviate your fear of failure: coaching services, online courses on how to pitch investors, top lawyers.

Your odds of success spike if whatever you’re selling taps into multiple fears: People will pay for gym memberships out of fear for their health, fear of failure, and fear of loneliness if they worry they’ll never meet someone unless they get into shape. They’ll shell out on an expensive business conference out of fear of missing out, fear of losing freedom, and fear of failure if they believe the conference will help them make connections and take the next step with their business.

Fear is a powerful, powerful persuader. It’s obviously not the only persuasion tool out there, but it’s the most powerful motivator you can use to drive cash flow, even over the rosey-dosey “make the world a better place” sales points. It’s one reason charities that want to change the world might find it hard to raise money from regular consumers, but businesses selling headache medicine, life insurance, stem cell storage, or shoes can charge a premium even though they’re not changing the world or curing cancer.

Speaking of fear, one of the reasons you lose negotiations is when you fear you’re going to lose the negotiation. That’s why it’s best to start negotiations when that fear doesn’t exist. In other words, negotiate when you don’t have to.

NEGOTIATE WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE TO

Shutting heyo.com down

Nathan Lakta █████████

to █████

Hey ███ team and I have been focuses on a totally unrelated (to social media, smb’s/agencies) opportunity for the last 9 months and its growing fast now.

We’ve decided to shut down heyo.com as a result (distraction).

Interested in assets? (it competes with BrightKit).

Did $600k top line revenue last year, 10k customers (1,800 montly recurring).

█████████████

to Nathan

Hey Nathan,

We did some back of a napkin and estimates and I think we could get you somewhere north of $500k in bounty when we look at the current user base and cross-selling in some of our other products coupled with $50,000 upfront cash. We be happy to sign NDA etc regarding deal terms, and can help make this a good PR win.

We don’t see much value in the technology and would also be able to get the team back to you. Let me know if you’re interested in hearing more, and I can share some of the modeling with you.

You’ll be negotiating deals all the time as you venture into New Rich territory. I’ll get into tactics for handling those scenarios later (chapter 13 shows screenshots on how I sold my first company). As you’re starting out, I want to help you use negotiation to create instant cash flow wins today. The more cash you have, the more freedom you have to grow those golden geese.

The most immediate way to free up cash is by driving down your big expenses. I’m going to guess your biggest costs are your rent or mortgage, car payment, and/or student loans. Most people feel trapped into paying these bills, but they’re more flexible than you think. I’m not talking about moving to a cheaper place, buying a clunker car, or consolidating your loans. That’s all obvious stuff. Assuming you’re already living within your means, you can keep your current setup and still negotiate down most of your bills (if you work at Starbucks and lease a BMW you have bigger problems than I can help you with).

Let’s say you’ve got enough money in the bank to cover two or three months’ rent. You’re not feeling financial pressure, but you’d still prefer to pay less than the full amount. That creates leverage for you. And the best time to use leverage is when you don’t have to use it. So if you’re reading this right now, I want you to negotiate when you don’t have to. Send an email to your landlord that simply says the following:

Subject line: Money Troubles

I’m going to have trouble hitting the rent payment this month. Is there anything you can do to help me?

That’s it. Click SEND.

What you’re doing here is forcing the other side to think about their opportunity cost. You’re creating doubt. And like fear, doubt is free to create, which is why it’s used so profitably.

In this case, your landlord’s opportunity costs are huge. Evicting you will be stressful and time-consuming. The apartment might be empty for a couple months while she looks for new tenants, and she’ll lose the full rent amount in that time. She’ll also have to spend money painting the walls and cleaning up the place before new tenants can come in.

Looking at those turnover costs, your landlord will not want you to stop paying rent and she will not want you to move out. She understands the value in keeping you. So when she gets your email she’s likely to give you a break on rent to avoid those big turnover costs. If she doesn’t lower your rent you might get an extension on paying it, or a discount in return for paying it back the following month. Any of these outcomes is a win! You get more time to pay, or you pay less. By simply creating that doubt you can gain yourself some leverage and save money.

The email above can also work if you own your home and have a mortgage with a small lender. It’s a big deal for your loan officer if you default on your loan. There are processes and procedures. It’s stressful. He has to report the issue to his boss and he doesn’t want to look bad. You won’t have much leverage if your mortgage is through a megacorporation, but if you have a personal contact for your loan that person is likely to work with you on taking money off your payments. Everything I’m saying also applies to your car loan or student loans.

Another option is to do something similar when you’re renewing your lease. Your landlord will inevitably want to raise your rent with the new contract (I always do). When he tries, negotiate like hell. I have six tenants living in one of my properties and each pays $375/month. When their leases were up for renewal I tried increasing everyone’s rent by $40/month, which is a pretty critical percentage hike. They negotiated and would only go up by $10/month. I went for it because I didn’t want to deal with the trouble of finding six new renters. You’ll always have this leverage over a landlord. Use it.

The critical detail here is to do these things when you don’t have to. Don’t wait until your bank account is at $0 to tell your landlord you’re not going to make rent that month. That gives them all the leverage. Do it when you don’t need the help. Then, if you really can’t get them to give you a discount you’ll still pay like normal. That will actually strengthen your relationship with your landlord because you’ll have underpromised and overdelivered. This isn’t about lying. It’s about creating a perception that you can use to your advantage.

Negotiating when you don’t have to also gives you options. Creating options goes beyond haggling over bills, but as you practice freeing up cash you’ll start adopting this mindset for everything you do. You’ll look for ways to create new options in how you spend your time and money. You’ll be more inclined to make unconventional choices so you can get closer to achieving what you want.

I’ve taken this concept so far that when someone asks me today what I do, I say, “I can’t really tell you.” That’s a good thing, because if they don’t know what I do, they can’t attack me. It’s the difference between being a round ball with no edges versus a square. People know how to hit a square. They know your edges. They know what you’re doing. A circle has no corners. It’s not defined. It can roll anywhere. You want to be that. You want to be unpredictable. It gives you incredible leverage because you can become the center of your competitors’ interest. They’ll want to know where you’re going, what you’re doing. They’ll worry if you’re going to compete with them. You want all of that leverage and you do that by creating options. You need to be able to go in any direction, or in as many directions as you possibly can, given the number of things that can happen to you in business and in life.

I play with creating options for my podcast all the time. When CEOs reach out to me asking about sponsor opportunities (happens weekly), I usually don’t have a spot for them. Sponsors are booked out months in advance so I could easily say I don’t have openings. But why would I do that? Same goes for anyone working in an agency model when you get new client inquiries, or any business that chases leads. Even if you don’t have room for the client or sponsor, or you don’t want them for any reason, let the conversation happen and see where it goes.

My response to anyone who asks about sponsorship is, “Yes, tell me what you’re thinking.” From there, I work them to some terms that outline what they’d be willing to pay per episode, how many episodes they want, and what return they want on that spend. And because I don’t need them as a sponsor I can be unforgiving with my pricing.

Once I’ve taken the conversation to the finish line and know my options, I can decide if I want to make room for that CEO as a sponsor. It’s a much better situation to be in than if I’d shut them down right off the bat.

That’s a big blind spot for people. They shut down opportunities they’re not interested in rather than letting the conversation play out. But remember, your best analysis is done when you have people’s best and final offers in hand, whether that’s employees you want to recruit, CEOs you’re trying to sell your company to, or customers you’re trying to sell a product to. You want to be as close to the finish line as possible before you decide on anything so that you have the best and most accurate data possible. Do this even if you don’t want the deal. Remember, your best position in a negotiation is when you don’t need it to work out. Your upper-hand approach may get you terms so good that you’ll change your mind.

HOW THE NEW RICH USE TIME DIFFERENTLY

You’re going to have a lot more time on your hands as you start mastering the concepts in this book. Time to dream up your golden goose, obsess over the systems that will keep it going, execute, and then create another one. Every golden goose you set in motion will open up more options for you.

Most people, though, won’t accomplish anything. They’ll get charged up by a project’s potential, obsess over their to-do lists, then feel paralyzed by the enormity of it all. Or at best, they’ll get through 10 percent of what needs to be done before they quit.

To-do lists ruin us. We try and fail to cross things off them, then we think: If we can’t get through one day’s worth of tasks, how can we get that giant life-changing thing done in just a few months? It’s because we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year.

Your brain short-circuits in the face of a huge project if you don’t organize your thinking. You have to sort your ideas and group them into yearlong terms. Then execute them weekly and make sure you live in the day so you don’t miss out on life. So you’re going to:

Dream in Decades → Think in Years → Work in Weeks → Live in Days

Dream in Decades

This is where you let your mind wander. Find a quiet space and let ideas build up as you dream about all the golden geese—and their golden eggs—that you want in your life. Think long, and think concretely: picture where you want to be in ten years, what your business, life, and home will look like.

Do whatever you need to actually feel that success. In the last chapter, I warned against the dangers of letting rewards motivate you, but if you have to focus on the golden eggs to feel that happiness in this dreaming phase, do it. Just make sure to aim for the ambitious eggs that are way out in your future.

I like winning; it’s what motivates me, so I tie my big goals to mini-competitions with other people who are my age. Some of my private mini-competitions right now are:

Think in Years

Remember when I told you in chapter 3 to take your big, audacious goals and break them down into systems? That’s thinking in years. You’re planning every part of the twelve-month layer cake that will churn out your golden eggs. This can be either new systems you’re going to build or current systems you’re going to improve. Also see which systems you can layer on top of each other for maximum output. Building that connective tissue between multiple systems is how you make 1 + 1 = 5.

I’m doing this now as I make plans to launch a new software company. I plan to build it through mergers and acquisitions, and I’m figuring out the systems I need to set up to get the company off the ground. I’ve figured out I need:

Each one of these is a part of my layer cake, and I can get them in motion within the year. Once that happens, I can start to understand what that cake might taste like when it’s fully baked. For my software company, that fully baked cake tastes like a new revenue stream to the tune of about $1M per year. And the systems that pump out that cash flow will allow me to invest more into the company and to continue to build that layer cake into an asset that grows for the rest of my life.

Work in Weeks

This is where the huge dreams mesh with reality. You know what you want to do in a decade, and in a year. You know the systems you need to set in motion to make it happen. Now, zoom in on the day-to-day for each system. This is when you obsess over the details. If you’re in a project’s development stage, what do you have to do from week to week to get it off the ground? If your systems are already running, what needs to happen every week to keep the project going and growing?

I take notes on all of my systems that include the details and time required for each step. When a system starts occupying too much of my time, or I just think we need to double down on a system for it to be most effective, I use those notes to figure out how to automate it and add it to the layer cake. That involves either finding software to help me execute or hiring someone to take over for me.

My system for booking podcast guests used to take up four to five hours of my week. In the time I was doing the work I wrote hyperdetailed process notes that I then passed on to Aaron, the person I hired to take over the job. Aaron is incentivized by $12 per booked episode.

When Aaron first started I showed him my system and asked him to focus on making it better as he used it. He takes notes on his improvements so that the next person can use that process if Aaron ever leaves me. Now I don’t spend any time on getting interview guests. It just happens. A beautiful system added to the layer cake. The best part: the more interviews that get booked, the more my wallet and Aaron’s wallet win.

Live in Days

This is where the work thrives or dies because of our dysfunctional to-do lists. Most things on our list never get done. We add to them and let tasks roll over to the next day, and the cycle never ends. I used to put my to-do list in Apple Notes. It was in one file and it would get longer and longer as the weeks passed.

The big reason this happens is because we don’t set up a mental framework for removing to-do items from our list. I’m not talking about crossing off a task when it’s done—I mean killing the items that sit on our list day after day, week after week.

I now evaluate my to-do list the same way I do my closet: the thirty-day rule. If I haven’t worn it in the last thirty days, and I don’t plan to wear it in the next thirty, it’s out. Same goes for my list. If I haven’t done it, and don’t see myself doing it, within thirty days, it’s gone. It’s a black-and-white decision. It takes too much energy to decide what to do with those lingering items if you don’t have a rule for dealing with them. You have to take a hot knife to that piece of butter and cut through it quickly.

When you live in days you’re focusing on the two or three things you can get done in one day that will help you reach what you want to accomplish in weeks. That work will feed up to the systems that you’re building over the course of a year. That’s it. If something on your to-do list isn’t achievable today, and it doesn’t feed up to your weekly and yearly targets, cut it before the thirty-day rule even applies.

Making sure your daily work feeds into your systems will also help you avoid that false sense of momentum so many people create when they do a bunch of easy tasks all day. They get the thrill of crossing those things off their list, but by the end of the day they’re sapped and never get to the big, tough stuff.

The quick rule I follow for myself here is to always tackle the big stuff first, right in the morning. When your decision tank for the day is full you have plenty of energy and total focus on the bigger picture—what you want to accomplish this week, this year, this decade.

I know someone who is working on launching a career as a voiceover artist. His plan looks like this:

As you hustle all year to hit those big goals you’ll eventually want to step back and see how you’re doing. But it’s cheesy to think about opening up your black Moleskine journal right before New Year’s Eve to “analyze” what you’ve accomplished. No one actually does that. I don’t care how many best-selling productivity books you’ve read.

So here’s the secret to recognizing what you’ve accomplished over the past year without having to measure everything. You just need to measure one thing: money in the bank. If that number has gone up in a year, then double-check that you’re living the life you want by asking yourself: Do I feel good?

If you answer yes to both, welcome to the New Rich.

HOW THE NEW RICH GET MORE DONE IN LESS TIME

So your golden goose strategy is set. You know what you’re doing today, this week, this year, this decade. It’s 9 a.m. You fire up your email on Day 1 of your New Rich action plan so you can get your first task going—a custom quote request to a clothing manufacturer in China for T-shirts you want to sell.

You’re about to click COMPOSE when you notice new emails. You decide to deal with them quickly: delete ten. Open three, read, mark as unread to revisit later. Shoot a quick reply to a vendor saying you’ll send payment on his invoice today.

Real quick: Jump on Venmo, pay vendor as promised. But first, reply to the three texts that came in since you last looked at your phone. Check Twitter super quickly because those notifications keep dinging. Reply to the two people who tweeted @ you. OK, back to Venmo. Vendor paid.

This reminds you that two clients haven’t paid you. Oh, crap—it’s because you haven’t invoiced them. Throw together their invoices, send, remember another client’s payment is overdue.

You’re about to email the delinquent client when your eye catches the time: 10:30 a.m. Your email to China is an empty draft in the bottom corner of your screen—and now you can’t even remember what you were going to write. Where did the last ninety minutes go?

You know this scenario sounds way too familiar. And that’s just your morning. There are still the impromptu phone calls, chats, and meetings that will kill your focus. It doesn’t stop. It won’t stop unless you make it.

Every time you switch tasks it takes five to ten minutes to reengage with the thing you were doing beforehand. If you switch tasks ten times during the day, that’s one hundred minutes, or almost two hours of productivity you lose every day.

This is why the world’s most efficient people batch time. And that alone gives the New Rich a huge advantage over others who let the distractions rule them. While everyone else is bouncing around to a thousand minor tasks a day—and not getting anything meaningful done—they don’t put up with it. Never mind those who hire assistants to do the little things for them. You’ll get there, but not soon enough if you don’t take ownership of your time so you can get the big work done.

The concept of batching time is simple: dedicate blocks of time (at least three hours) to one task or project. No switching to do little things in between. If you have multiple big projects going on, it helps to batch time by days instead of hours. This is how Jack Dorsey runs both Square and Twitter. In an interview with Techonomy, he explained how he runs the two companies simultaneously:

The only way to do this is to be very disciplined and very practiced. The way I found that works for me is I theme my days. Monday at both companies I focus on management and running the company. We have our directional meeting at Square and we have our OpCom meeting at Twitter. Tuesday is focused on product. Wednesday is focused on marketing and communications and growth. Thursday is focused on developers and partnerships. Friday is focused on the company and the culture and recruiting. Saturday I take off, I hike. Sunday is reflections, feedback, strategy and getting ready for the rest of the week. . . . It sets a good cadence for the rest of the company so that we are always delivering, we are always showing where we were last week and where we are going to be the following week.

By batching his time Dorsey is living in days and working in weeks, always looking at the bigger picture with both companies.

I use a tool called Acuity Scheduling to batch my time (you can see it at NathanLatka.com/schedule). It lets others see your availability so they can just pick a time to meet. I set three-hour blocks for podcast interviews, each one for twenty minutes. Guests get a link to my schedule and pick a time in my available window. When my schedule is set, I have three twenty-minute meetings per hour, back-to-back. No switching costs. Hyperefficient.

Batching time sounds simple but it’s difficult to start doing from scratch. Our brains have become programmed to constantly react to distractions. So to start, pick a day next week to focus on one task or theme and force yourself to ignore in-the-moment interruptions. You also need to save yourself from yourself. You know that even when someone isn’t interrupting you, you sabotage yourself by always checking email, social media, texts, whatever. Put your phone in another room or at the bottom of your bag. Use an internet-blocking tool like Freedom.to so you can’t check whatever your brain swears is so urgent. You’re going to feel much better at the end of the day. You’ll have more energy because you won’t have wasted so much time starting and stopping things. And generally, you’ll get significantly more done.