Buy Back Your Time | Book Review

Many of the opportunities you have in life are generated by the
energy you create around you. (p. 133)

Dan Martell delivers indispensable advice to any company founder seeking successful growth and, in the process, offers valuable techniques for any leader. The basis for the book: The little-known secret to reaching the next stage of your business is spending time on only the tasks that (p. 4):

a)   You excel at.
b)   You truly enjoy.
c)   Add the highest value.

This review focuses on three recommended activities related to Academy Leadership Excellence Course (LEC) workshops we may immediately put to work. 

Prioritize

Although tempting to adrenaline junkies, simple busyness can’t be the secret ingredient to business success (p. 3). Martell offers a fantastic solution for the delegation challenged:

The Buyback Principle: Don’t hire to grow
your business. Hire to buy back your time. (p. 6) 

He offers a list of favorite excuses for not acting. As a typical manager (p. 14), you think:

• I don’t have the time.
• I can’t afford the help.
• No one’s as good at the work as I am.
• No one wants to do the work.
• I can’t find good people to hire. 

Each of the five excuses might be heard during any Setting Leadership Priorities workshop, especially when justifying low self-evaluation scores. During these workshops, we identify High Payoff Activities (HPAs) and Low Payoff Activities (LPAs) using the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule. Martell introduces The DRIP Matrix (p. 30) emphasizing that the more time spent in our Production Quadrant the more our business will grow successfully.

Let’s examine two ways we may immediately put the matrix to work. First, the Delegation Quadrant contains tasks that we need to get rid of ASAP (p. 32). For many of us, this may be routine work better suited for a more junior person new to the business, or best handled by an administrative assistant. An even better approach, when delegating, is selecting someone who places the task in their production quadrant.

Second, let’s align the Investment Quadrant (on the left) with the Important but Not Urgent Quadrant (on the right) as shown in Academy Leadership’s adaptation of Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix. Typically tasks in the Investment Quadrant fall into these categories (pp. 34-35):

• Physical activities
• Time with others
• Hobbies
• Industry collaborations
• Personal and professional development 

We’re not looking for an immediate Return on Investment (ROI) with these activities, and their results may not be readily measurable. The goal is to always have some activities in the Investment Quadrant that nourish your soul, your relationships, and flex your creativity (p. 35).

Martell shares Five Time Assassins on p. 54: The Staller, The Speed Demon, The Supervisor, The Saver, The Self-Medicator. For leadership growth, we should immediately address The Supervisor: You fail to properly train, micromanaging others, failing to empower them to grow and learn (p. 57). We should likewise begin performance coaching at the same time.

Energize

Energy Management workshops begin with an average workday audit. Martell recommends the same. If we could audit her time and find what tasks were sucking all her time and energy, we could then transfer those tasks to someone else (p. 70). Remember, our goal as a leader is increasingly managing our energy, not our time. The proactive person already has blocks in their calendar that work best for various activities – not just their time, but also their energy (p. 134). This should include segments for supporting, developing, and coaching our teams. You can batch similar tasks on the same day to save time and energy by switching tasks as little as possible (p. 147).

Recall from our Energize2Lead (E2L) workshops, If you can find out what each of your employees loves to do, then productivity will accelerate (p. 189). That’s the essence of understanding the preferred, or upper E2L profile dimension. When we apply this to ourselves, we’ll be more energized, and more authentic. When you’re energized by passion, the way you talk about your goals and the future has a different energy, and there’s nothing more contagious than energetic people (p. 205).

Coach

In Chapter 9, Martell introduces four time hacks. Two are terrific for a leader’s toolbox. In our Feedback (Communication) workshop, we role play a Brief-Back Exercise and learn it’s easy to miss many details when requests are made. Another tool is Martell’s Definition of Done (p. 153). These definitions each start with the statement “This task is done when…” and may range from a simple definition to a more complex definition comprising facts, feelings, and functionality.

We can call the second hack The 1:3:1 Rule (p. 154-155). Many Leadership Philosophy (PLP) documents request sharing solutions along with issues, and this new rule goes a bit further:

1.   Define the one problem that needs to be solved.
2.   Offer three viable solutions.
3.   Make one suggestion from that list of possible solutions.

Summary

Overall, our goal is migration from transactional management to transformational leadership (p. 173):

Transactional                      Transformational
Management                       Leadership

Tell                                         Outcome
Check                                    Measure
Next                                      Coach

Becoming a better leader and coach at the same time.

If you want to have a high-performance team,
learn how to coach successfully. (p. 180)