A Simple Exercise to Take Back Time to Focus on What Matters

Eliminate, simplify, automate, delegate, and own - in that order

Dear subscribers,

Today, I want to share a simple exercise to help you focus on what matters.

As someone with a full-time job, a creator business, and two kids — I have to be really disciplined about how I spend my time.

This exercise takes just 30 minutes and leaves me more in control of my life.

Credit to Justin Welsh for inspiring it. I recently interviewed Justin about how he built his $8M solopreneur business (subscribe to my YouTube to get it in a few weeks).

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Rank your tasks by their impact-to-time ratio

1. Write down your goal

You can’t prioritize your tasks without a clear goal. For example, I want to grow revenue for my creator business this year.

2. List all your tasks during a typical day

Reflect on your past week and list every task you did to make progress on your goal.

For example, as a creator, I did everything from writing this newsletter to researching podcast guests to posting on social media.

3. Calculate your impact-to-time ratio for each task

Go through each task and write down the:

1. Impact towards your goal (1 = low impact, 10 = high impact)

2. Hours you spent on it over the past week

Next, divide the impact by hours to get each task’s impact-to-time ratio. Here’s what my list looks like after sorting by this ratio from highest to lowest:

I can already draw a few conclusions from this table:

1. Newsletter tasks have the highest ROI.

2. Podcast tasks take more time but have limited revenue upside in the short term.

3. Social tasks have questionable value overall (if I’m honest, “getting ideas from social” often devolves to just doom-scrolling and wasting time).

You’ll notice that the action column is empty — let’s talk about how to fill that in next.

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For each task, decide if you want to eliminate, simplify, automate, delegate, or own — in that order

Now comes the fun part — look through your list again and assign one of the following actions to each task:

1. ❌ Eliminate

2. ⏱️ Simplify (do less)

3. 🤖 Automate with AI

4. 🤝 Delegate to others

5. 🎯 Own it

After going through this exercise:

I went from fully owning 18 tasks to just 4!

Here’s what my list looks like after assigning an action to each task, along with what I actually did next to take back my time: