Author, entrepreneur, and “overwhelmologist” Ari Meisel reveals how to optimize, automate, and outsource, gives a masterclass in Virtual Assistants 101, explains what delegation REALLY means, and breaks down the "3D" inbox zero plan.

This gentleman you're about to hear from. His name is

Ari Meisel. He has an amazing story. He was diagnosed with an

incurable and very painful chronic condition, which we're

going to talk about, and I'll let him tell you about it, and

the strategy that he used to save his life and get his life

back also then turned into a system of productivity that he

has built a huge online following around now teaching

people how to do this. The system's called Less Doing and

More Living. So Ari, thanks for being here. Just tell everyone

like, what's your story? What was the condition you had to

kind of tell us what the trajectory your life was on, and

then what change you made, and what was the result of that?

So, I was working in construction. I was in real

estate development in upstate New York, and I was, I was

living a very hard lifestyle. I was working, you know, 1618,

hours a day in not the safest conditions. I was smoking a pack

of cigarettes a day. I was eating fast food, drinking

stress beyond my mind, and basically broke myself. When I

was 23 I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which, as you

mentioned, is an incurable illness, and it was a very, very

rough for a few years, and I was on a lot of meds, and I kept

getting sicker, and then basically had this big

turnaround where I went on this long journey of self tracking

and self experimentation. And about four months after that, I

got off my meds, and two months later, was in my first

triathlon. And the way that that sort of all confluenced into

creating what I do now is that I went from a place where I was

working 18 hours a day to barely being able to do an hour of work

a day, and I was also stressed out of my mind. So less doing

basically, was born out of this need to mitigate stress and get

more done in one hour than I had been able to get done in a full

day before.

And so before we dive into kind of how that applies in the

professional world, what were some of the things that

happened? What are some of the things that you did?

Well I did a lot of experimentation, but I ended up

with a high fat, low sugar diet. So that was a big one exercise,

not that I recommend Iron Man, but exercise to the extent that

I was really ramping up my metabolism. So I was able, in my

opinion, to burn through food a lot better. Which one of the

issues with Crohn's is that you end up getting obstructions

because you have all the scarring. So that was helpful.

And then it really all came back to stress, you know, because you

can tell somebody, and I've replicated my results in dozens

of other Crohn's patients at this point, but you can tell

somebody, Hey, you want to feel better, eat this, take these

supplements and do these exercises, and it's

prescriptive, and they can do it or not do it. But if you say to

somebody, okay, now you need to manage your stress, it's, it's

way more nebulous. You know, it's a lot harder for people to

sort of get their hands around that. So I wanted to create a

really systematic way of doing that. So the overall framework,

the baseline framework, is that I help people optimize, automate

and outsource everything in their lives, including their

health, in order to be more effective. And it's just a very

important order for me, because most people in the modern world

have an experience with delegation, even if it's just

telling your kids to do their chores. But the problem is, is

that a lot of people get into this mode where they tell

somebody to do something, and that's it. That's the end of it.

And that's not true delegation. And really what you're just

doing is basically sweeping the dirt under the rug. It doesn't

make the problem any better. You're just shifting it to

someone else, and in most cases, that will come back to you

right. The pipes got to back up. So you have to optimize first.

And with optimization, what I'm really talking about with most

people is tracking because there's so much going on in our

lives, so many inputs, so much stuff, and a lot of the

overwhelm that people experience is because they just don't know

what's causing the overwhelm. So if you start to track things,

and whether it's how many emails you sent yesterday, how many

steps you took today, how much sleep you got, what you ate, how

many phone calls you made, and how long they lasted, like all

of this stuff that we do now can be tracked pretty much

automatically, and even if you don't do anything with that

information, just tracking it, it has been proven to be really

powerful in terms of giving us back a little element of

control. Hopefully, what you do with that information is start

to identify how you were actually spending your time,

your money, your energy, your resources, and then look at the

processes that you're going through to see areas that you

can make more efficient. The second part of automation is

really my playground now, because so many things can be

automated today, we we can automate things now for free, in

many cases that three months ago, a person had to do. It's

just fascinating what technology has done for us. So you optimize

for us, then you automate what automate what you can and then

if there's anything left over, that's the first time you look

at outsourcing it to a specialist or generalist of some

kind.

In terms of measuring like, what are, what are some of

the common things that you see or you find that you go these.

These are the things that people are doing that are causing them

overwhelm that they don't realize are causing them

overwhelm?

So there's two sides to that equation. Right on the

one side, you have the day to day stuff that just annoys

people, you know, like making lunch, making school lunch every

day. That's something that's just, you know, it's difficult,

especially for people who are nine to five jobs. It's

stressful. It really is. And I have three young boys, and I. Do

it. We do it every day, but it's also something that definitely

can be made more efficient, and there are ways to do that.

Paying bills, those are the kinds of things that almost

everybody has experience with. How you commute to work is

something that can be made more efficient, whether it's not

necessarily the route, but there's a lot of things you can

do while you are in transit that people don't necessarily think

that they can get done especially like, for example,

you could have a virtual assistant do all your email with

you on the phone while you're driving, which is totally fine.

You could dictate an entire book if you wanted to while you were

driving. You know, there's all sorts of things that you can get

done in a commute. I mean, and a lot of people, that's a really

effective strategy. But then there's the other side of it.

There's the really big projects that people wrongly assume have

to be done by them so they'll never get done. And they assume

that because, like, who could possibly do this? But what they

don't realize is that there are tons of services or tons of ways

to get that done. My father is a great example. I was having

dinner with him last night, and he was saying that he's got this

collection of photographs that he'd really like to sell. He's

like, but I have to photograph him. And then I was like, Dad,

we can have literally two people come and do that whole thing for

you, from the photographing it to the cataloging, to the

putting it on eBay to the shipping. I was like, you can

just say, do it, and I can get this done with no effort on

either of our parts. And it's so it's that kind of thing too,

where people just, they just don't and it's not their fault.

They're just not aware of the fact that there are these

services and there's people that are available to do this stuff

for you.

So I want to talk to you about the world of virtual

assistants. Tell us, like, what do we need to know about them?

Where are they? How do you use them? What do you use them for?

Okay, so it's great question. I'll tell you what the

industry looked like and what there is now. So the landscape,

as it was, was there were two kinds of virtual assistants, and

I've been a huge, huge fan of virtual assistant services for a

long time. I've tested 23 of them over the last five years,

and learned a lot, obviously, from doing that. I actually

think that everybody should work with a virtual assistant at some

point, especially if you're in a nine to five job or a corporate

environment, because it's a learning experience for you in

terms of how you effectively communicate and delegate the

things that you want done. So there are two kinds of virtual

assistants. There's the on demand assistant, which is the,

well, actually, I'll start with the other one. There's a

dedicated assistant, which is fairly straightforward. It's

where you're dealing with one person, and they get to know you

and and, by the way, just to define virtual assistant, it's

really just an assistant who isn't in the room with you.

That's basically what it means. It could be across the across

town, or across the globe. And historically, five years ago,

I'd say, if you really, if you wanted a virtual assistant, you

went to India. That was just the way it was. There was companies

like ask Sunday you had Friday tasks, today tasks every day.

There was a bunch of them. And that was the place. But now it's

the last place that I would want to get a virtual assistant from,

because the labor market for virtual assistants there just

got completely flooded, and the quality went down quite a bit,

which, by the way, is an interesting observation on

outsourcing in general. Because if you want to go to India for

outsourcing now, SEO is great where, and this stuff shifts

around, like if you want to get graphic design done now, Eastern

Europe is fantastic. Poland is great for programmers right now,

and Costa Rica is fantastic for call centers. But that wasn't

the case two years ago. And I don't know why that is, but I

just see these things if you if you do want to go out of country

for virtual assistant now, most people would go to the

Philippines. The only problem with that the Filipino language,

Tagalog is extremely facial expression based. So when you're

communicating with a native Filipino speaker over email or

over a text message or chat, they what happens is they end up

taking the instructions very, very literally. So that's okay,

but that usually means that you have to be very specific to with

what you're saying. Fortunately, now you can get virtual

assistants that are US based and which is great for a number of

reasons. Obviously, you get native us speakers. You get

people who have a little bit better cultural context for some

of the things that you might have them do. Timezone is the

third one. So that's a dedicated system where you have one person

you're always talking to them, that you can train them. They

can learn how you like doing things, who you like to talk to,

where you like to go for meetings, all that kind of

stuff. The other side of it is what's known as the on demand

virtual assistant, and that would be something like fancy

hands, which I do recommend. It's a great company, and with

fancy hands, what you get is access to over 3000 assistants.

And you put your task into a pool so you email it or leave a

voicemail, and any one of those assistants can pick it up, do it

and move on prem. Now, the benefit to that is that it's

usually a lot cheaper, enormously cheaper, to have On

Demand assistance. You get 24/7, response time, because there's

always somebody awake that's ready to do something. You get

much faster response time. Typically within 10 minutes,

you'll have somebody on something, and you get people

from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets, the

downside is that they're limited to tasks that take less than 20

minutes, because, you know, it just that's the way it is.

There's no continuity. So if you're not good at describing

your tasks, then you're going to have an issue. They can't make

big purchases for you. So what we have now, which is the let's

do us, is a hybrid. We. Basically have a dozen

assistants working with us right now, and what you get when you

work with us is access to the whole team. And because they are

trained in less doing methodology, they can you can

work with that team as if it was working with a dedicated

assistant. So every time they do tasks for clients, they're

helping create those processes and optimize them. They're

adding information to a very detailed client dossier, so that

even if somebody were to quit or get sick or move on whatever,

then it doesn't matter, because we've created all this knowledge

base on how to work with that client. And of course, that

information is transferable to other clients. So what that

means is that we actually are more like on demand project

managers, because you could never tell a virtual assistant

produce a podcast. That's just way too big of a thing. We can

do that. So what we're trying to, what I've been basically

trying to position this as, is something that the market is

missing, where people can say what they want done and we

figure out the rest, so they don't have to know how to hire

people or what the best resource is to get particular aspects

done, we can do that.

What kind of cost range are you looking for? For this

kind of thing?

Typically with the Philippines, you're looking at

between eight and $20 an hour, and you have to look at,

obviously, a cost benefit analysis in terms of quality of

the labor and the skill set that you're getting. And you know, if

somebody's a quarter of the price, but it takes them four

times as long, or they have to redo it four times. That's

obviously a problem.

The question is, how much rework is has to be done? How

much training, just the fear that somebody else who doesn't

work in my company every day is going to actually be able to do

this effectively.

Well and see that, which is one of my favorite

things to do for people, because I have taken I've never seen a

process that I could not systematize in a way that

somebody could do it without any training. And I mean that, you

know, so from very, very complex processes, too, it's really just

a matter of breaking it down to its most basic chunks and

automating as much as possible, by the way, so that there is no

that, you know, we don't even have to worry about human

involvement that could possibly mess up something, and then the

stuff that's left to actually be done by a human is not

stupefied, but it's really just made into a checklist that is

easy enough to follow. And doctors, surgeons and pilots,

who have done procedures 1000s of times, still use checklists

so that they don't miss things. Proper delegation is when you

effectively communicate your needs to somebody to the extent

that they can take it and run with it to the point of being

able to overcome certain hurdles on their own without having to

come back to you so that you can go back to doing what you do

best and not managing that person.

Interesting. Let's just talk about the inbox. That's the

big, mammoth beast that everyone struggles with and creates the

stress for the professional world, and you have the Inbox

Zero plan.

Yeah, absolutely. So really simple, three Ds. You can

only deal with an email once, and this, and it's one of the

three Ds. The first one is to delete it because it's not

relevant or doesn't require a response. And I would tell you

that 40% of the emails that people respond to don't actually

require a response. If you've ever found yourself sending an

email that said, thanks, or great, don't The second is to

deal with it. If you can deal with something in the next three

minutes, deal with it right now, because there won't be a magical

three minutes later. And I don't mean click it, mark it unread

and be like, Okay, I'll come right back to it. No. Deal with

it right now. That could include a little subset D, which will be

delegating it so you can pass that off to an assistant or a

spouse or a coworker, and the third one is the most

interesting. So if you can't delete it and you can't deal

with it right now, then you need to defer it to a time that you

can more effectively deal with it. And for that, I recommend

something called Follow up.cc so you can forward that email to

8pm at follow up.cc or Thursday at follow up.cc or one week at

follow up.cc whatever time period you think might make the

most sense for you to actually be able to effectively deal with

that, and it will then come back to your inbox at that time so

that you can and the most effective time to deal with it

is not just because you have free time. It's also because you

are maybe in a better state to do that, or because you have

more information, or whatever it might be, and that's basically

the strategy.

Well Ari, I think where do you want people to go to connect

and learn more about you and all the different things that you

have going on?

They can just go to lessdoing.com, they can find out

about the podcast, the book, the blog, everything is there.

Well, Ari, keep inspiring people and keep preaching the

good word, my friend.

Always a pleasure to talk to you.