Ep. 226 - Steve Glaveski, Author of Time Rich: Do Your Best Work, Live Your Best Life on the Power of Time Management

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Steve Glaveski, Author of Time Rich: Do your Best Work, Live Your Best Life. Steve and I talk about the power of time management and what individuals and organizations can do to become smarter and more productive. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption each week. We'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation.

Interview Transcript with Steve Glaveski

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Steve Glaveski.  He's the author of the new book Time Rich: Do your Best Work, Live Your Best Life. You may have seen and heard of Steve. He's been on the show before. He came out to the IO Summit a couple of years ago. And so we're super excited to have him back. All the way from down under, welcome back. 

Steve Glaveski: It's an absolute pleasure to be back on the program, Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, we're excited to have you back. You have become a prolific writer since last we've spoken. I think you've come out with a couple different books. Today we wanted to highlight the new one that you've got coming out called Time Rich. Before we get started, why don't you give the audience a little bit of background of what you've been doing the last couple of years, from starting Collective Campus and Division Accelerator, and now author of a couple different books.

Steve Glaveski: I think that's been somewhat part of the catalyst for writing this particular book, is that I did establish Collective Campus. That was about five years ago now. And we've gone on to incubate over a 100 startups that collectively raised about $30 million in that time. I've spun off a kid's entrepreneurship program called Lemonade Stand, which was initially a two-day workshop.

It is now a SAAS platform. So we've got clients in Singapore, in Honduras, Australia obviously, all over the world. And during the pandemic actually spun out a company called No Filter Media, which is effectively a podcast network, but also has articles and all that sort of stuff. I keep busy, but despite the fact that I have so many things going on, I tend to work maybe five to six hours a day, tops on average.

Now there are days where you go beyond that, but then there are also days where it might just be two or three hours. And given all the time that I've spent in the corporate world, working with large organizations, as well as entrepreneurs and startups, I did see a disconnect between how they were going about making decisions, how they were going about using their time, and the way I was doing things.

I figured that there was a book in this because the article I wrote for Harvard Business Review called the Case for the Six Hour Workday a couple of years ago, just absolutely blew up. And then my publisher came knocking as well and said, Hey, is there a book in this? 

Brian Ardinger: That's a good place to start. There's plenty of books out there about time management. And why do you think people are still getting tripped up when it comes to managing their time effectively? 

Steve Glaveski: I think a lot of it goes back to evolutionary biases, Brian. As human beings, we've basically evolved to conserve energy. At least our brains have, because tens of thousands of years ago on the African Savannah, you don't know when you're going to eat.

It was all about the three F's, you know, fight, flee, fornication. And you needed to conserve energy and that helped us back then, but now the way it shows up is actually detrimental to our work because we might sit down to our desks in the morning, and it's so much easier for us to do the easiest thing, which is jump onto LinkedIn, check out comments, get onto Twitter, check out email.

Get to inbox zero. Do anything on everything except the hard work, you know, commit to another meeting. What happens is you can fill your entire day, your entire week, your entire month with non-consequential activities, which make you feel quote unquote busy, but come the end of the day, you didn't really have anything to show for it.

So a big part of it is not the fact that people don't have access to tools. It's more so it starts with us and overriding some of that evolutionary programming. And the other side of the coin is really, the organizations that we work for. Because we can control certain things. But then there are certain things that we're bound to that we perhaps can only try and influence, and that can get in the way between us and our best selves.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's an interesting world we're living in, obviously with COVID and everything else. Overnight organizations had to adapt to the brand new world of remote work and things like that. I'd love to get your take on some of the trends that you're seeing or what you saw maybe six months ago, versus what you're seeing now and how organizations have maybe adapted a new thought process on time and work management.

Steve Glaveski: Yeah, definitely. I think the pandemic, obviously as difficult as it has been for a lot of people has also been a reset switch, and it's forced us to reflect on our personal lives in ways we perhaps didn't previously, as well as our professional lives. When the pandemic hit and organizations of all shapes and sizes went remote, it seemed to be a matter of just taking what we did in the office and trying to replicate that online.

So instead of 50 to 60 physical interruptions a day. It was 50 to 60 interruptions on Slack, if not more, or Microsoft teams. And instead of having back to back meetings all day, it was back-to-back zoom calls. So we were effectively at what Matt Mullenweg call's level two in his five levels of remote work, just recreating the office online.

Whereas now I think the more progressive forward thinking late is out there and starting to actually think about how can we use this medium to our advantage, to get the most out of people and to also help the organization move forward. They're realizing that if we do move away from organizations built around real-time communication, towards more asynchronous communication, well, that has all sorts of benefits. 

Like if our organization is about responding, when it suits us, providing it in a timely basis, that then frees people up to cultivate more time for flow, because they're not constantly whacking moles all day, responding to Microsoft Teams messages in an instant emails within five minutes and all that sorts of stuff.

That also means that because they can cultivate more flow state, they can also design days as it best suits them, which helps them in terms of their work-life balance. Some people might have young kids, some people might have other things they want to commit to during the day, and they can do that with an asynchronous shift.

And the third piece is also that when you run that type of environmen...