Buy Back Your Time

One of the book I read last month is “Buy Back Your Time” by Dan Martell.

I came across this book listening to a video of Ali Abdaal, but this is exactly why I just decided I won’t follow Ali anymore. Here’s why: there are some people you can find useful or even inspirating, but it depends on several factors, like the moment and objectives in a time of your life; the, these people (as well as ourselves) change. So someone that used to seem “interesting” becomes trivial and “not so useful” anymore.
In this moment I’m writing, in Goodreads this book has a score of 4.42/5, that is actually a very high score. Even reading the reviews, it’s not clear to me how this book can be judged “great” even by those people claiming to be seasoned entrepreneurs and managers. I’ve been a manager myself for more than 10 years, not to mention the years in a military academy, where you soon learn how time is crucial and that you need to delegate – they train you a little bit to do so, even inviting VIPs in the field to talks, but it’s mostly a training on the job in the hard way: if you fail, you’re out. Still as an officer, I kept learning on the delegation topic, at various levels, even now that I decided to leave the armed forces. I am surprised about the “popularity” of a book that only presents a few key concepts, most of the time without the needed complexity, but a few examples on standard entrepreneur/corporate related cases, pretending to teach a framework that, in my opinion, it’s just a bunch of some old frameworks revisited. I won’t even mention here the style used by the author, starting with his wannabe sad story (once a child with skills to become entrepreneur one day, and with a fascination toward software design, then became a young rebel in Moncton, Canada, who stole a car to leave the city, then was chased by cops and faced jail) and then the recovery of the “hero” in his climb to success. Same I think for every non-fictional book: from the depth and the way topics are presented, we can identify a target; this time, I sure am not in the target. After all, the author wrote he was enlightened by books like “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, and “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey” (you know I don’t judge stuff without knowing them, so yes I read those books and I think they can be interesting in a way… if you are 8 years old and searching for some shortcuts with people and things). Same is for the examples provided by the author in this book: Oprah Winfrey, Andy Wharol, and some other idols for the masses.

Nevertheless, I kept reading the book so now I can now quickly summarize some points and add a few considerations of mine. Here there are.

A few of the basic concepts you probably found everywhere, plus a couple of frameworks

The importance of the habits (see: How (yet another book on) Atomic Habits made me think), remember that systems are more important than goals (David Allen wrote it much better and with the needed complexity in his “Getting Things Done”), the “buyback loop” called Audit-Trasnfer-Fill, followed by delegation and then replace your time with something that you consider having more value).
The “Time and energy audit” is much better explained in Designing Your Life, while the approach of “divide et impera” and then start doing stuff is better explained in Allen’s GTD.
You should spend your time on only the tasks that: (a) you excel at, (b) you truly enjoy, and (c) add the highest value (usually in the form of revenue) to your business.
The Buyback Principle: Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.
Then, Martell shows a framework called DRIP matrix (where DRIP is the acronym of Delegation, Replacement, Investment, Production) where you can find typologies of activities to put in these 4 quadrants (that in a way recalled to me the Eisenhower matrix that I saw the first time something like 20 years ago), in this way:

–	Boring	Exciting
High value	Replacement	Production
Low value	Delegation	Investment

In a few words: the goal is to spend the majority of your time in the Production Quadrant, plus a little time into the Investment Quadrant. Delegation and Replacement Quadrants sound the same to you, except that “Replacement” is more a sensitive delegation (since involves activities with high impact/value) that requires usually more time/effort to delegate (e.g.: carefully teaching and requesting feedbacks). “Delegation” are the usual administrative tasks, emailing, research, travel, and so on – I can say something you don’t need a special person or a complex system (so a “mecahnical turk” or even automation, specially now with the rise of machine learning, e.g.: the new “copilots”), while “Replacement” need more care (sensitive activities like sales or marketing that usually need expert people to discuss with, more or less complex systems and close feedback). “Investment” (in yourself, in relationships, or in your business) is like the “Not urgent, but Important” quadrant of the Eisenhower matrix. Finally, “Production” is where you’re making ideally lots of money and your energy is flowing, so where you may want to spend as much time as possible.
For the Replacement quadrant (so for the high value delegation), what I can personally suggest from my military experience is something like a videorecording or logging or tutorials, plus SOPs for each major case study, usually at high level (sharing the vision, at least for the appropriated need to know we want to share, since we can even delegate to someone external and we don’t may decide to reduce trust to the minimum). In NATO and national military frameworks, for example, there are several publications, for everything (most common: on organizations and systems, including maintenance planning and operative procedures that even the last soldier that joined the company could follow), usually in a hierarchical way (e.g.: 1.x.x is for communications, 1.1.x is subset for mails, 1.1.1 is related to the sub-subset of models for executive mails to write to chief of staff and so on). If you’re curious and passionate about meta and recursion: yes, there’s even a publication on how to write a publication.
Coming back to the book, author writes:
“The 4 Cs of a Playbook. Here’s my Playbook on Playbooks. First, there are four essential pieces: The Camcorder Method (the training videos) The Course (the steps involved in the process) The Cadence (how often these tasks should be completed: monthly, weekly, daily, etc.) The Checklist (the high-level items that must be completed every time)”.
Another thing I see the author took from the military world is this approach:

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

Obviously, the author quotes the Pareto principle and other well-known “truths” on some systems, as well as “Big Dreams Crush Distractions” (so: power of visualization and focus).
Then, the author explain his rule of thumb about suggested costs on delegation, in terms of money: to explain something easy like “you shouldn’t spend, for one hour of delegated task, more than 1/4 of your paid hour of your work”, he wrote pages full of examples, really writing that this “complicated formula” (like: divide your yearly salary by 8.000 – assuming you work approximatively 40 hours a week so 2.000 hours in a year) is “to all my math nerds”. Really? Now I can understand why he wrote he preferred arts and studied no math at all – and that’s why I won’t never stress it enough: do a favor to yourself and to the world, learn basic math to understand the world and learn how to manage it (e.g. with Data analytics). So, put it shortly: if you earn 10$ per hour, you shouldn’t delegate for more than 2,5$.

Once you start delegating, you will:

• get paid more;
• enjoy your work more;
• give someone else a job.

A thing that I want to emphasize is that responsibility can’t be delegated: when I was a Commander and also responsible for information security, I delegated some activities, sure, but then I carefully reviewed everything (hopefully review is a much faster activity than searching and writing). What I suggest, for really sensitive tasks, is to rapidly implement a QC/peer-review phase, better if within a RACI matrix.

The author also quote Allan Dib: You can always get more money, but you can never get more time. So you need to ensure the stuff you spend your time on makes the biggest impact. But here people embracing FIRE movement (Fisker, author of ERE, one of them) could say that’s not correct: with money we can actually buy time, in the sense that when you reach a certain amount of money you may decide to quit your activity (if you want) and then have all the day for yourself, so in that case the approach is quite the opposite (if you save the money you can allocate to delegate, the 25% said before, you can then accumulate enough to retire earlier, there’s no one way better than the other one).

Finally, he suggests “7 Pillars of Life”, a Cheat Sheet he wrote he uses every week to score himself and see how he’s doing.

• Health: without it, you’ve got nothing. Many people wait until their body tells them to quit
• Hobbies: use decompression. Those fun things you used to have time for? Your hobbies aren’t just for you, they’re for everyone around you. They’re the key to maintaining excellent mental health.
• Spirituality: tap into the energy. This isn’t about religion, although it certainly can be. What’s most important is that you develop a spiritual connection with the world around you. That could mean meditation, yoga, or going to church.
• Friends: don’t drop the ball. Often, entrepreneurs embody the typical type-A personality. But if you don’t get your head out of the work and start spending some time with your friends, one day you’ll look up and no one will be there for the moments that matter most. Friendships are like muscles: if you don’t invest in them, they fade away.
• Love: go all in on your relationships. You need to be all in, all the time. “Love” clearly includes spousal relationships and children, but I think we should also extend more love through every human connection.
• Finances: face the money. You can manage to put your finances out of your mind for the moment. However, they’ll always be nagging at you, slowly draining your energy in other areas. Face up to your finances.
• Mission: know why you’re trying. People say they want to be successful. But if you ask “What does that look like?” they can’t answer. They don’t know why their health matters, their work matters, or anything matters. In your business, you need to remember the mission that inspired you to start in the first place.

Some considerations

One part at the beginning of this book is a big red flag to me: “You won’t be fully alive without being an entrepreneur, because it’s in your DNA. But if your company’s killing you, your family, or your relationships, with tasks that are eating all your time and energy, you can’t go on like this. So don’t. I’ll help you find a better way. This is the story of how I changed my approach—and how you can do the same”. If you can’t spot anything weird, I’ll quickly point out what’s wrong:

1. The author assumes that everyone want to start a company/activity;
2. We are dealing with a survivor (see: survivorship bias) who is telling us to have found a general replicable model, valid in every context. Same is true for another sentence the author write: “Successful people aren’t doing what they love because they’re rich. They’re rich because they’ve learned to do what they love, and only what they love.”. In this way, after exposed a couple of examples with a huge cherry picking, he is suggesting that basically just follow and master your passion (see “So good they can’t ignore you” by Cal Newport) you’ll become rich (again: not even a more generic “successful”, but “rich” – so I guess that all the heroes who volunteers, serving people with their expertise, mastering what they love, are here to blame since they didn’t learn to do ONLY what they love).

Generally speaking, one of the main issue, in all kind of books like this, is that the assumption is always: you may want to make more money. I’m not saying that money are not important, but that probably is not the first goal to everyone: do you think that one wants to become a fireman, a military officer, a teacher, or even a missionary… for money? And those are just a few examples, same is for “average workers”: you can see many stories in “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, where ordinary people were happy without searching for a pay raise or even avoiding a promotion. Sure we may want to minimize the time for activities we don’t like, that’s why some books like “The 4 hours workweek” are best sellers, but at the same time delegation, like also “productivity hacks” are just tools, that we may want to know but not necessarily want to use. I knew people that used to run with their car, in a risky way, just to win 2 minutes in their commuting to… waste hours in front of trash TV. It seems that some people are so limited that their “Ikigai” is just based on maximize money while minimizing time spent achieving more money.
Compare this suggestion of delegation with Thích Nhất Hạnh, in enjoying even washing dishes in mindfulness, and with Fisker’s ERE, where he says exactly the opposite: DIY even for general tasks the average man delegate. As I stated in the “about” in this website, I strongly believe that (excluding physiological and base psychological stuff that, on average, is similar to everyone) each one is different, with different culture/values/objectives, so yes, you can suggest some concepts and implementation according to your personal point of view, but only a stupid would assume that everyone wants to follow the same pattern. So to speak, there are people that admire Steve Jobs, others hated him, someone want to live like Elon Musk, others are extremely afraid to spend even 5 minutes like him (I didn’t write “5 minutes” by chance, it’s actually how it seems he divides and schedule his time).
As I said at the beginning of this post, I really know the importance of delegation, I myself found how much powerful and “liberating” it is – and even when we think that we can do better than others (not because others don’t care, but because we are perfectionist in everything, except when it comes to define precisely what/how we want things to be done), there’s joy in seeing others learning how to do things (or maybe it’s just me, I love teaching, observing others growing up in a professional and personal way). At the same time, I saw the effect of non-delegating, with some colleagues of mine rapidly going to burnout, since with rank usually it comes more tasks to manage and, this is the point, to manage/control/organize/check/supervise not to do, but to order collaborators to do – if you don’t learn it quickly, you’ll go crazy, literally, while the people you manage will also feel frustration since it seems you don’t trust them enough to delegate task to them.
Moreover, there’s a big difference in being (or feeling) busy and being effectively productive: that’s why we should concentrate in important tasks for us, where we can express also our full potential, and delegate all the rest: we may be slow and angry in declaring taxes, prone to make mistakes, while a person paid to do that can be a fast professional that may even like it.
Another couple of points I really find controversial are:
“Decision to not grow is a decision to slowly die. Marketplaces evolve because human nature forces them to. Susan will always want a faster bicycle. Kevin will always want a better iPhone. Larry will always want a bigger TV. That growth-bent DNA expresses itself throughout every human decision. Even if you’re a small business in a local market, if you don’t evolve, your customers will leave for a better option. Growth isn’t just necessary for expansion. Growth is necessary for survival” and “Perhaps the worst possible outcome of stalling isn’t just your customers leaving you, but your employees leaving you. When you decide to stall growth, you start a countdown timer on how much longer your star players will hang around. The same nature that drives little Susan to want a faster bicycle is the same nature driving adult Susan to want a promotion, more money, and greater responsibilities in her career”.
These are exactly the reason why I strongly suggest everyone to read books like “The Happiness Trap” by Russ Harris: we should fight this behavior that was really useful in the past and that can be helpful in case of real emergency, but that nowadays, for the average western human being, is dangerous and lead to, at better, to continuous dissatisfaction.
What also made me a little bit sad is to read, even in 2023, people writing: “Steve Blank compared working in a startup to marines fighting in a war”. Man, I was in “operation areas” (a fancy politically correct to say I participated in missions), nobody should use this terminology unless they tried what is really like, since risking life is not risking money while the night you can go back to your comfortable and safe house. Moreover, several studies suggested, during our last pandemic, how comparing situations to war is something bad for our mind. I thought that this narrative stopped in the pages of “The stupidity paradox” (where the 2 professors explained the toxic behavior of some companies, specially during 80s and 90s, with “fights” between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, for example). Same is for another sentence: “Entrepreneurs are also Navy SEAL–level problem solvers. You enjoy solving huge problems so much that if there isn’t a problem to solve, you’ll make one up”. They really should stop writing this way.

There are few things I think he should have mentioned, like: setting PKIs (without falling into the Goodhart’s law), gamification, importance of checkpoints (see Gantt) and honest feedbacks (both ways: employer to employee and viceversa) and few examples of typologies of leaders in delegation, like:

–	Low control	High control
High vision	Visionary	Commander
Low vision	Victim responder	Micromanager

If you’re really interested in learning better concepts and methods, I strongly suggest you to read the books I mentioned along the way before.

And now, don’t waste more time!