How Do You Work Less?

Stephen Shapiro is a quintessential Free Timer. Throughout his 20+ year self-employment tenure, he has run a variety of experiments to optimize for freedom and joy. To name just a few: working one hour a day (for years!), clearing space for 15 weeks of travel and/or vacation each year, and week-long hotel stays for focused work sprints. 

We also talk about the “existential meltdown” that led to a business model redesign, and why he doesn’t need or want to build a team right now, beyond an extended network of specialists, and why he’d rather sell 10 copies of his next book to the right readers (potential clients) than 10,000 copies to the masses.

More About Stephen Shapiro: Stephen cultivates innovation by showing leaders and their teams how to approach, tackle and solve their business challenges. He sees what others can’t: opportunities to improve innovation models and the cultures that support them. He is the author of six books, including Goal-Free Living, The Little Book of Big Innovation Ideas, Personality Poker, Best Practices are Stupid, and his latest, Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems.

🌟3 Key Takeaways:

• Leverage is the key to working less. Ask, how do I do less and get more?
• Goal-free living: You may have aspirations, but detach from the outcome. Aim for a sense of direction, not a specific destination, then meander with purpose.
• Focus on leading indicators, not lagging indicators for day-to-day energy and effort allocation. Leading indicators are actions you take to create the results you want; for example, five networking calls per week typically leads to at least one new client. Lagging indicators measure what has already happened; for example, how much revenue you generated last month, or how many newsletter subscribers you added.

📝Permission: Do less and get more. Each day, imagine you only have one hour you can work. How would you spend that hour? 

✅Do (or Delegate) This Next: Try working one hour a day for one week. Each day ask yourself, “What’s the one thing I have to do that will have the greatest impact today?” You might end up working more, but if you shoot for that single hour, it will focus your thinking.

📘Books Mentioned:

• Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business
• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
• Life After College
• Stephen’s Books
• Goal-Free Living: How to Have the Life You Want NOW!
• Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems

🔗Resources Mentioned:

• Stephen on the web, Twitter: @stephenshapiro, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube
• Stephen’s podcast: Invisible Solutions
• Video: TEDx NASA Innovation Keynote | Stephen Shapiro
• Concepts: Goodhart’s Law, the Cobra Effect, Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

🎧Related Podcast Episodes:

• 018: Workcation in the City
• 166: Crashing into Quiet Time 🏝️
• 035: The Long Game with Dorie Clark
• 091: Quarterly Planning with Charlie Gilkey
• 028: When the Financial Tides Recede
• 084: Sprinkling the First 1,000 Serendipity Seeds of a Launch

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