306 – Are You Spending Your Time In The Right Area

John Over the last two decades, I’ve been on an insatiable quest to learn everything I can about leadership. What makes the best leaders so good? After running companies small and large over the last 20 years, today I speak on stages all across the world to audiences who are interested in that same question. My name is John Laurito. I’m your host, and I invite you to join me on this journey as we explore this very topic and what makes the best leader so good. Welcome to tomorrow’s leader. All right. Welcome to today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader, where we dove deep into all things leader-related. All things everything leader-related. My name’s John Laurito. I’m your host today. 

John And welcome to today’s episode, which will be a quick episode. Why do I say that? Well, because in 8 minutes I’m a guest on someone else’s podcast, so I get to get my butt in gear and make this productive and valuable and short. Okay, first things first. Yes, I heard you loud and clear. There are many, many frustrated people with me because apparently in the last episode I told you who the winner was for the riddle, but I didn’t give you the answer. So there are a lot of people out there pulling their hair out. Like what? The Laurito. What are you doing? Okay. My apologies. You know, there’s just a lot going on in a day, in a week. And, you know, there’s a lot of stuff going on in my head. I just forgot. So here it is. The riddle was, how is four half of five? And again, I didn’t tell you the I told you the winner. Who was Tatum Secrest? But I did not tell you the answer, which was how is four half a five? Well, if you write out five f, i, v, the I, and the V, which are half of the letters that represent the Roman numeral four. 

John That, my friends, is the answer. Okay. Another series of props to a few other very smart people out there. First of all, I had given a riddle that was to drop a raw egg. How do you drop a raw egg from a height onto a concrete floor without cracking it? And the answer given by Tamara, Indiana, was it won’t crack the concrete. Yeah, see, concrete floors won’t crack by an egg dropping on them. A little play on words there. So congrats to Hammer, Indiana. And secondly, the other riddle, or thirdly, the other riddle that I had last a couple of episodes ago was the more there is, the less you see. And the correct answer is darkness. Darkness. The more there is, the less you see. And that was given by Sage Blakeney. Congratulations, Sage on being a real winner. So there we go. Two winners, Tamara, Indiana, and Sage Blakeney. Very, very, very smart, smart, smart people. 

John Okay, here’s the riddle for today. Put your thinking caps on again. You know how to get in touch with me. Text me, call me. All that kind of good stuff. Here we go. One night, a ninja and a pirate are on a boat. The boat crashes, the pirate jumps off first the ninja jumps off second. And who jumps off third? Hmm. Okay, think about that. One night, a ninja and a pirate are on a boat. The boat crashes, and the pirate jumps off first. The ninja jumps off second. Who jumps off third? Text me or call me. 8605737230. Let me know your answer and I will give you some props and make you famous all across the world. Okay. Today’s topic. Here’s the thing. I get questions a lot on how to ensure you’re doing the right things and am I spending my day or my week doing the most valuable tasks? The people that have worked with me know that I’m super passionate about this concept of the time value pyramid, which in essence is a pyramid showing the value dollar value per hour of the task that you’re doing. 

John Sometimes, even though we were very productive people, sometimes we get caught doing $10, $20, $30 an hour work when we’re trying to or we are on average making $100 an hour or $200 an hour, whatever the case may be when we’re trying to get up that pyramid and spend our time doing the more impactful type of work for us as leaders or running a business or an organization, whatever the case may be. Here’s a simple thing that you need to think about. The simple framework is if I and it’s a math formula if I’m spending too much time below and you could take your income over the last 12 months and divide it by the number of hours on average that you worked for the year, that is your hourly rate. Okay, good, bad, indifferent, whatever it is, that’s your hourly rate based on what you did in the past. Then if you’re trying to drive that up, your business owner, a leader or your sales or whatever the case may be, you’re trying to increase that. You have to spend your time working above that average in tasks that are higher value dollar amount, they’re higher value, more important, impactful tasks where you spend your time is incredibly meaningful to this. But in order to do that, it’s not just the concept of adding more to my plate. It’s got to be. I take things off from the bottom. A really simple framework of how I think about this is what is one thing that I want to do. If it’s one hour we’re talking about what’s one hour that I want to spend over the course of next week doing something that’s at the top of that pyramid? High-value task, that’s a framework. That’s the question number one. 

John Secondly, what is at the bottom that I want to take off that week? Okay. In other words, if I’m doing something that’s kind of $10 an hour work and I don’t want to be doing that, what is it that I’m going to take off my bottom end of that pyramid? And then the third question is, what am I going to do with it? Is that thing that I’m taking off? Is it something that needs to get done? If not, maybe I’m just going to discard and ignore it. Is it something I can replace with a process that may be automated, in which case great? I’m going to replace it with an automated process and nobody needs to do it. It’s the technology for you. Or the third might be a delegated and put it in somebody else’s hands. Okay. Those are the three options of how to figure that out. So one is what is at the high end of that pyramid that I’m going to do? What’s one thing what’s one thing at the bottom end that I’m doing that I want to take off my plate? And then third is how am I going to do it? Real simple. So if we want to think about we can add more hours of the week, we can have more hours of the day. It’s all about the choices that we make regarding what we do. I find this concept incredibly impactful. If we can just shift one hour a day, that’s a monumental, magnified, transformational change in your life and in your business. Can I spend one hour of my day on the really high-end, high-value task and replace it? That was something that I’m doing that’s kind of wasting time, whatever that may be. 

John Maybe you’re a Tik-Tok fanatic. Maybe it’s an hour of that and replaced with something that’s really impactful, meaningful, helps other people, influences, makes a change, leaves people better off, makes money, whatever the case may be. Okay. So that’s my 8 minutes for you today. Short, sweet. I know this is one of the things you love most about this podcast is the brevity. I get right to the point, give you a little nugget to leave your day and hope. We make it a better day for you. 

John So thanks for tuning in today. Like, share, subscribe. You know the good stuff. Go down below. Give a five-star review. I will see you next time and I am honored to be a guest on the podcast. Take care. Bye. 

John Thanks for joining us on today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader. For suggestions or inquiries about having me at your next event or personal coaching, reach me at John@johnlaurito.com. Thanks, lead on!