Zack Arnold

Let's create things that matter. Together.

The Art of Less Doing (And More Living)

Do Your Best Creative Work Take Care of Yourself

About Episode

How much time do you spend every day in your email and your various other inboxes? How about running errands, paying bills, posting messages to social media, or any one of fifty other repetitive tasks that never seem to end? It can often seem nearly impossible to manage the amount of things that have to be done on a regular basis, but the good news is there is a better way.

In this episode I have a rapid-fire conversation with Ari Meisel, the co-founder of Leverage (formerly “Less Doing”) as well as the author of such books as “Less Doing, More Living” and “The Art Of Less Doing.” We talk about how you can organize, automate, and outsource much of the needless busy work in your life so you can focus more on the important work you should be doing instead.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Ari Meisel, who is essentially a productivity guru. He is the author of such books as Less Doing, More Living, Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything, Intro to Biohacking, The Art of Less Doing, and he’s also the co-founder of the website Less doing.com So, Ari, it is a pleasure to have you here.

Ari Meisel: Thanks, Zack. It’s really nice to talk to you,

Zack Arnold: And based on all the things that I just read, it really sounds like you don’t do much of anything, so, so, what in the world will be doing here, talking about this today? And the reason that I really wanted to get you on the show is, I had Greg McEwen on the show a couple of months ago, the author of Essentialism, and I love his concepts and his philosophies, and it’s really game-changing type stuff, but what I love about your site specifically, and what you do is you really, really drill down into specifics, so it’s not just, well, you need to do this, that, or the other thing that are very conceptual, it’s here’s this app, here’s this app, here’s this app, so you kind of take the macro and you break it down into the micro, so I kind of wanted this to be somewhat of a complement to that, as well as sharing some of your own ideas, as well. So that’s kind of the idea for the show today. So we’re actually wanted to start, though, before really drilling down into the very specific stuff, where you can help is just kind of give us a very brief, like three minute elevator version of how you got here, because I think it’s important for people to understand your history with health and how that kind of led you on this journey.

Ari Meisel: Absolutely, so I, and by the way, Greg is awesome. Greg’s been on my podcast, so, and I do think that there’s a good compliment there. So, I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. I worked in construction for about 14 years after college, and essentially, well, it wasn’t 14 years worth that caused the problem, but after about three years of really working my butt off, I basically broke my body and was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, which is a chronic inflammatory condition that affects the digestive tract and is considered to be incurable. Now, I had a particularly severe case and got into a very, very bad place with my health and my mental state of being, and I got to a low point where I really felt like I was going to die, and had to really turn things around, and after several months of experimenting on myself, I was able to finally overcome the illness, and then through that process I found that stress was such a big part of what was happening to my body that I needed a systematic way of attacking the stress, and that somehow it turned into a completely brand new system of productivity, which I would call less doing, as in less doing, more living, and less doing really grew out of that as a blog, and then a class, and seminars, and workshops, and consulting, and coaching, and finally I started with my partner, Nick Sonnenberg, about a year ago now, we started the less doing virtual assistants, and that’s really where a lot of the focus is now, is that we’re able to offer people who can put my teaching and my philosophy into action for people by helping them optimize, automate, and outsource everything in their lives and their businesses.

Zack Arnold: So, one of the key takeaways that I got from your book, Less Doing, More Living, is the idea that productivity and outsourcing, and all these things, it’s not just about maximizing how much you get done. It’s really about being able to not feel guilty when you’re not working, because you already feel confident that you’ve done the things that you need to do. So, it’s not about never watching television, or never going on Facebook, or never enjoying yourself. When you’re doing those things, you’re consciously doing them, because you know you’ve done the things you need to do,

Ari Meisel: Right, exactly that, and also it’s not just about like not working. I think I really take this holistic view that there’s a work-life integration into what we do. It’s not really a work-life balance, so anything that we do is an opportunity to grow, it’s an opportunity for progress. So, for me, a big driver for what I do is that I really want to be spending time with my family and my kids and my wife, so I have four children that are all pretty young, and I want to be with them and do things with them, so everything that I do is sort of serving to that in most cases, and being with my kids a lot, being with my family a lot puts me in situations where I have to be more productive, so I have to be able to get something done in three minutes, for example.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s exactly how I’ve kind of restructured my own life as well, and I’ve talked about that in past podcasts, is this idea of that you have to define your greater why, and then everything else flows to that. So, for me, it was all right, I now have two young kids, I don’t have four, and I clearly have no idea how you can even survive that, because two is more than enough for me. But you think to yourself, well, that’s the number one priority, but I also have all these other things I need to do, so I need to figure out how to do them better and faster and more efficiently, because of the family, not just because I want to get more done during the day. So defining your why is something that I think is very, very important, but where I want to go now, since we have a limited amount of time, is the idea of the Pareto principle this 8020 principle, and if you were to apply the 8020 principle and talk to somebody that were coming to you for the first time that really has no concept of productivity or outsourcing or doing less, what would be the first thing that you would say to them? This is where you need to start, and then let’s drill down into that,

Ari Meisel: So. So people have to start with, well, so optimization, which is the first part of lesson, is really about tracking, and I really see that we have evolved much more slowly biologically than we have technologically, and we just can’t expect ourselves to keep up with all the things that are happening in our lives, so it really has to start with some sort of tracking, so that you can bring some awareness back to what you’re actually doing with your resources, and those resources could be time or money or energy, or whatever you want. So, track something that’s how you start, and if you want to track your sleep, or you want to track what you eat, or you want to track how you’re spending time on your computer, all of those things can be done with free apps or services nowadays.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s one of the first things that I will tell people in the online courses that I have, and on the website as well, is that if you want to improve upon something, you have to quantify it first. You have to say, “Here’s my baseline, here’s how many steps I get per day, here’s how much sleep I get per night, here’s how many calories I’m eating. Not be judgmental, not say I have to do an overhaul, just start by knowing where you are. Once you have that baseline, then you can improve upon it, so I would agree with that completely. Another one that I think is just huge, that has completely changed the way that I do things, that you talk about a lot, is the idea of batching tasks. So, can we drill down into that a little bit?

Ari Meisel: Yeah, so that’s a really important one, and you know, for example, this interview that we’re doing right now, I’ve just finished four back to back interviews, not just for other people, but for my own podcast. So, Friday morning is like podcast time, and it’s great, because I mean, there’s a few, so there’s a few ways to look at this. One is that if I just have a bunch of meetings and calls, and then I have one podcast interview in the middle of the day, to be perfectly honest, like it’s very likely that I will be happy to do the phone call out in my car, going somewhere, or I’ll be happy to work at a coffee shop, and then I’ll be like, “Oh, I really need to be somewhere quiet for the podcast, but just have this one podcast interview, it’ll be fine, and I’ll just put in my headset, I’ll do it, and it probably is fine, but it’s not the best that it could be. Whereas now, Friday morning, I’m doing all podcasting this morning, I have my perfect setup here with my perfect mic and my headphones on, and I’m in a quiet room, and it’s better, and I’m in a better state, in a better mode for it. So, really, what that comes down to is, we’re trying to stop multitasking. Multitasking doesn’t exist, so stop trying to multitask, you can’t do it, you can’t do it properly, it doesn’t work, it will just hurt you in the long run. So, focus on one thing, and that focusing on one thing could also mean focusing on one kind of thing,

Zack Arnold: Yeah. But if I’m multitasking, I’m getting so many more things done at once, and I look crazy busy, so I must be hustling, I must be a hard worker, right?

Ari Meisel: Yeah, of course, exactly. To the people who are standing behind you while you’re in your socks and underwear at home working, right? Everyone’s looking over your shoulder to see how busy you are, and you know that’s the difference between being productive and being efficient, so being productive is really just getting more output, it’s more widgets, more words on a piece of paper, but efficient is where we’re doing it with the least amount of input, and that’s what we’re talking about,

Zack Arnold: And that’s exactly my philosophy as well. Where I probably am at my job the least amount of hours of anyone, and I’m always going home earlier, and I’m never working nights, but that’s because I’ve rearranged the way that I do my tasks during the day, and the amount of efficiency that I have for those tasks that I’m almost never putting in any kind of overtime or late hours, and that to me is the payoff of take kind of going over this learning curve of, oh man, there’s so many different apps to learn and productivity hacks, like I don’t even know where to start, I have to take the time to make the time, so I’m not going to bother.

Ari Meisel: Yeah, exactly.

Zack Arnold: So, what would you say is the number one thing that slows people down that they need to start batching? And I have my answer, but I assume yours is the same, but we’ll find out.

Ari Meisel: The number one thing that people should start batching.

Zack Arnold: Yes,

Ari Meisel: Actually, I’m surprised. I’m curious to hear what your answer is, because it really does vary for different people. I mean, you just to look at the things that you’re doing in your day, and the things that you do on a regular basis, and then just try to clump those together, honestly. So, if you’re a writer, you shouldn’t be writing like a little bit here and there, not to say that you can’t do something like the Pomodoro technique, where you’re writing in sprints, but you should also try to block those things together. If you’re going to be doing phone calls, try to do those all at the same kind of time. So, for me, the batching is really, there’s sort of three buckets: is there’s podcasting, there’s client calls, and then there’s team stuff for my, for the VA team. So that’s that’s sort of how I mainly bucket things. I don’t bucket the personal stuff, because that’s sort of like where everything else is, and I like the lack of structure that we tend to have when we have family time.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I agree with that. I would say that the number one thing that I tell anybody to batch, because regardless of what you do for a living, this is something everybody deals with, and that’s email, and I tell people that if you’re going to do your laundry, you don’t throw in a sock and run the washer and the dryer, you wait until you have a full basket of laundry, but people are taking individual emails and treating them like one dirty sock and running an entire load of wash, and to me, the amount of time spent on email. I think there was a research study that just came out that says that on average people spend up to six hours a day in their email, and the cost of companies paying people salaries to do that is astronomical.

Ari Meisel: You know, I just want to tell you that in all the years I’ve been doing this, like that, actually the laundry one is one. Of the best analogies I’ve ever heard someone use for how email is done incorrectly, so really nice.

Zack Arnold: Well, you’re more than welcome to take it, but yeah, that’s what I’ve been teaching everybody, is I tell them how absurd is it to not batch your laundry, and you’re doing the same thing with email, and there are certain industries, like for example, if you’re in customer management and you do customer service, your job is responding to email, so that is your job, but if your job, especially, is in a creative field, which I am, and all of my listeners are being in email all day is just making you infinitely less productive, and it’s taking your train of thought away from being creative, and I try to teach people how to automate being creative and how to automate movement throughout the day, just the way that you teach how to optimize and automate other types of services, and one of the big ones is you have to eliminate the distractions and start batching your creativity and intersperse that with movement all day long, so you’re fueling your brain, so that it sounds like you and I are definitely on the same page.

Ari Meisel: Absolutely, and so tell people that email too, specifically. So, the reason that that didn’t come up for me is, well, first of all, I’m very efficient on the email, but one of the things that’s a big game changer with email is if you’re working with a team, we really try to push people with what with our consulting to use Slack with their teams, and when you use Slack properly and you implement it properly, a team internally can go to email zero, not inbox zero, but email zero, so we’re there. Is not a single email that is exchanged between me and anybody on my team. Email is just used for external stuff, for communicating clients, or prospects, or outside contractors. Everything else is in Slack, which basically cut down my email usage by about 80%

Zack Arnold: Yeah, Slack is one of the mainstreams of all of my teams as well, because I’m working on three different projects, one of which my regular job, the other being the podcast, as well as building the online courses. And the first thing I tell people to join is, I say, this is the last email you’re going to receive from me. We’re either going to be talking in Slack or we’re going to be talking in Trello, because Trello is essentially the external version of my brain, which is something I want to talk about more, is externalizing and outsourcing parts of your brain that are hindering your creativity, but between Slack, Trello, and Google Drive, I never use email with anybody that I work with on a regular basis. There’s no way to eliminate email if you’re trying to reach out to potential clients or sponsors, or whoever it might be outside of your circle, but once you’re inside working with people, email is just a useless waste of time, and is no longer necessary.

Ari Meisel: And I’m glad you mentioned Trello. It sounds like you and I are way like on the same wavelength about a bunch of things, because for us, again, moving when we work with companies through our BPO consulting, which is business process optimization, we find that that 8020 is accomplished through Slack and Trello. If we can get a team, a company using Slack for communication and Trello for project management or anything actionable that solves 80% of everybody’s problems.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. And the people that I’ve worked with so far have just had their jaws dropped open, like for example, I’m teaching the first course on lynda.com all about how to do project management in Trello, and the producer that I’m working with, I said, listen, this is going to be a little meta, but we’re going to use Trello to do the course on Trello, and she’s like, “Oh, that sounds like fun. So I showed her the whole workflow that I’ve been teaching, and she said, “I’m never doing my courses the same way again. I’m telling all my other clients and authors we have to do it this way, because I have saved so much time in my day already, just with you. It is huge the way that all that works. So let’s go down a little bit deeper into email, because I feel like if there’s anything that people need to fix and kind of take back their lives and their day, email is the first place to start. So, one thing that you talk about a lot is follow up cc. Let’s go to that first, and then I’ll go to my follow up question, no pun intended.

Ari Meisel: Yeah, right. Well, so I can talk about it, but I’ve, for the first time in years of recommending, follow up.cc I’ve officially changed my recommendation to people using Google Inbox.

Zack Arnold: Interesting, I would have thought you were going to say Sanebox, because that was what I transitioned.

Ari Meisel: I hate Sanebox, really.

Zack Arnold: Then I have to go on a tangent. I would love to know why you hate Sanebox over follow-up or Google Inbox.

Ari Meisel: Okay, so well, are you in? Are you in Gmail?

Zack Arnold: Oh, yeah, yeah, I have like four or four Gmail accounts.

Ari Meisel: Okay, great. And have you tried Inbox?

Zack Arnold: I have not. No, I wasn’t even aware of it. I’ve been so focused on learning Sanebox and integrating it.

Ari Meisel: Okay, so when we get off the phone, you just have to go to inbox.google.com and you’ll.. it’s just an overlay, and you’ll see what it’s like immediately without having to commit to it. But okay, so what will.. for people to understand, fallout.cc is a platform-independent tool that allows you to send an email to anybody, and then you could, in the BCC field, for example, you could say three days at follow-up.cc or 10pm at follow-up.cc or one week at follow-up.cc and when that time period came around, it would basically bring that email back into your inbox as a reminder for you to either follow up or mark it on, or whatever you want to do. Now, I recommend, I’ve been their biggest referrer. I was an advisor. I still love the company, but I have to say that Inbox from Google has really accomplished everything that Follow Up SEC was doing. One of the reasons that I don’t like Sanebox, so, and for people who don’t know what Sanebox is, Sanebox helps to organize your email for you, essentially, and it has all these different. Folders such as Sane Later, which is kind of like fallout.cc It’s got the newsletters, it’s got the same black hole, which is like things you never want to see again. I think that it requires too much work. First of all, I think that you have to train it, and it has to learn a lot from you before it’s really usable. And I’m generally not into tools like that. It’s one of the reasons that I don’t have an Android phone, because I know that Android is more powerful, and you can do a lot more things with Android than you can with the iPhone, but you take an iPhone out of the box, and five minutes later you’re using your iPhone. Take an Android out of the box, and after a couple days, you kind of customize it to the way that you want to use it, and I don’t like that. So that’s one of the problems with Sanebox. The other thing is that it has all these different folders that you then I think it doesn’t give people peace of mind, that’s a big part of it too, is that you end up having people, and I see this all the time with Sanebox, is people are always wondering, like, where was that email, what, like, did it actually go to the later, or was it in my newsletters, or like, I actually did want to read that, I’m not sure where it is now, I just think that it creates a little bit of doubt, and that’s just completely useless, which,

Zack Arnold: In the sense of all the things that you teach, I can see then why Sanebox doesn’t make sense, because you’re not just about making things more efficient, you’re about kind of set it and forget it, and I don’t want to have to train it, I don’t want to have to look through six folders, so I totally get that. So, my question then about Google Inbox, does it work if you have custom domains, because the majority of my email is all in custom domains and not@gmail.com

Ari Meisel: Yeah, that’s fine. No, you can have all your email accounts coming into gmail, no matter what.

Zack Arnold: Oh, well, then that’s something I’m definitely going to look into, because I’ve just started getting into Sanebox recently over follow-up, because I said, well, it does the same features that follow up does, but it actually had more features. But it’s interesting how you’re looking at it as taking too much work, so that’s really interesting.

Ari Meisel: Well, another thing about it too is just generally speaking, I like built-in tools rather than external providers, because there’s just.. it’s like one more thing that could break or not work properly for some reason. So, just so people know, like Inbox is so cool, it does bundle things together, but it does it, and I think in a very interesting way. Whereas, so Sanebox will have all your newsletters in one folder. Just because something’s a newsletter doesn’t mean that you don’t ever, ever want to read it. A lot of the problem with that is that we don’t have the time or this or the mental space to be able to read these things. But the truth is, you probably subscribed to the Court’s Daily Update because you were interested in keeping up with the news that Quartz is putting out there, so why would you subscribe to that just to have it disappear into some folder that you will never check? What Google does is it bundles that into an updates folder, and then you can decide that you want to see that update bundle once a day, once a week, whatever. So basically every morning at 715 I get three bundles in my inbox, and each one of them might have 25 or 30 things in them, but I can look at the updates bundle, and I can go through those 30 emails really quickly, because I know that I’m looking at updates, so it’s like, oh, there’s that one from woot.com and there’s this one, oh, but there was a headline there in courts, and I actually want to keep that, I’ll read that later, so it just gives you like a really good mental separation, and then the other thing is that the snooze functionality is fantastic, so you can snooze something in inbox to whenever you want, you know, 10 days from now, next week, whatever, and it’ll come back. You can also snooze it based on the location, so if you have the, if you’re using your phone with the with the Gmail app, and you want to remember to talk to your kid’s teacher when you get to school, you can have that email pop up as a reminder when you physically get to school.

Zack Arnold: Wow, that’s powerful. I love contextual location-based reminders. That’s something that I actually set for myself in IFT, but being able to do it with email, that’s pretty sexy. So, you have sold me, and I’m definitely going to look into Google Inbox, and anybody that’s listening thinking I really need to take control of my email, because email has taken control of me. For the love of God, look these up, because once you get email out of your life, you’re like, “Oh my god, what have I been doing with my day? I can actually start creating things again, and like be more active, and it really is amazing, because email, I think, is just is the number one culprit that’s really taken over people’s creativity and productivity,

Ari Meisel: And not only that, email is a really great tool if you use it properly, so you can actually get back to using it as a tool.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly, because it can be very, very powerful, and you can reach out to a lot of people. Is like, for me, I batch it where I only send email once a day in the morning to predetermined lists of people that are all kind of batched within a similar context. So, for example, oh, I want to focus on podcast sponsorship this week, so here are three people a day I’m going to reach out to. I already know I’m going to be doing it at 8o’clock in the morning after I’ve done my morning ritual, so that it can become very powerful and efficient, but I’m not getting lost at all the noise.

Ari Meisel: Yeah, absolutely.

Zack Arnold: The next place that I want to go, because we have a limited amount of time, is this idea of outsourcing and automating, this is really your specialty, is how to outsource and automate tasks, whether it’s using VAs, whether it’s using dedicated assistance. So, kind of give just the basic overview, the five minute elevator pitch for how this process works and why it’s so game changing.

Ari Meisel: So, a lot of people try to outsource for. So that’s a mistake, because you don’t really understand what the problem is, and it’s very hard to communicate that to somebody in that case. So you really have to start with the optimization, which we talked about, which is really identifying what the actual process is, what you’re doing with your time, the tracking, and everything. But then we look at automation first, any way we can avoid it’s funny, because I have an outsourcing company, we have the lesser ring virtual assistants, and we’re outsourcing 1000s of things a month or a week, rather, but I’m always looking at ways to avoid outsourcing as much as possible, because if you can automate something, usually you can do it cheaply or for free, you can completely scale it indefinitely, and you become error proof. Now, that’s something that no human being can ever offer. Now, that’s not to say that there’s not a value to humans, there clearly is, but we’re getting in the way of that value by making humans do those things that can be automated. Finally, once we’re done with optimization and automation, if there’s anything left over at that point, that’s the only time that you need to involve a human being, and it also becomes much clearer at that point why you would involve them or who you would involve. So that’s that’s the order that I follow with everything.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s the way that I run it as well, where I say I have task A that needs to get done. This really isn’t something that I should constantly be doing, because I could be doing other things that are better served for me, but I have to know how to do it first. Then I have to figure out how do I automate it, whether it’s well, we can go into some of the apps that I use that I, that I know that you use as well, but then you say, is this something that I also need somebody else to monitor. Okay, then I outsource. Can you give a very good common example of how somebody can start automating or outsourcing something fairly simple and free up time in their day?

Ari Meisel: Well, it can be as simple or as complicated as you want it on this one, but I would say podcast production is a big one, because everybody’s got a podcast nowadays, and obviously we’re doing one right now. Podcast production is a big thing that we do, because I create a really good process where essentially when I do a podcast, all I have to do is hit record, talk to somebody interesting, which is the only part I can do, or the part that only I can do, and I save it, or I don’t even have to save it special, actually, it’s automatically going to Dropbox, and then I’m done. I don’t have to do anything else, it goes into Dropbox, and then everything else happens from there. It gets the graphic design done for the image, it gets blog posted, the copywriter does the transcription, the audio editor does his work, it’s and all the posting is done, it’s all done. So I do a recording, and then three or four days later I see it on my blog or in my newsletter for the first time, and that’s a really awesome process, because when I started this podcast, my podcast four years ago, it took me about 15 hours of my time to do an episode.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, you’re preaching to the choir, man. I was pulling my hair out, thinking, oh, you just record a file and you upload an MP, and then I looked at the process, I’m like, are you kidding me? This is a full-time job. Yeah, so I started looking into how do I do like you do, and I’m not quite at the point where I can just hit the stop button and I’m done. I have like 15 minutes work I have to do afterwards, but once once I have the file up, then it’s all through Trello, all automated. I have editors, have, like you said, people that are doing the copy, doing the show notes, all those things. So that’s how I’m able to do podcast and have a full-time job as well. Is that I’m really not doing that much, because I built these systems in. So my favorite apps for doing this are IFTT and Zapier, and I know that you’re on board both of those as well. Can you explain a little bit how those work and make them sound a little bit less intimidating than their names?

Ari Meisel: Yeah, so well, IFTT is the easiest place to start. I wouldn’t even tell people about Zapier right now, honestly. I would just say that start with IFT, and if you find yourself running into limitations, which you could, you can play an IFT for quite a while. Then that’s when you want to look at Zapier. Basically, Zapier is a more powerful version of IFT. So, IFT stands for if this then that, and it’s basically just that. If this happens here, do this over here, and it can be anything. If somebody mentions me on Twitter, send me a text message. You can get into the physical world too. If somebody rings my ring doorbell, then send an alert to me through Slack. Every week we have a reminder for a meeting, post that into Slack. If I post a new blog post, then see the RSS feed and post that on Twitter, or put it into Buffer, so it goes on all my social media. The kinds of things that take you 45 to 60 seconds to do, and you’re doing them 100 times a day, and it’s wasting your time and exhausting you. Yeah, I think

Zack Arnold: Those are they’re very, very powerful. And once you start to use them, and you realize it’s literally just click and drag, like, oh, I dragged this picture here, and I want it to do this, and then I drag this picture here. Like, it’s super, super simple. It’s not like you’re writing code or doing all these if this then that statements. Like, it’s very, very simple, and one way that I have taught people to use IFT, not just so much to automate simple tasks, but to actually help them internalize ideas or goals or aspirations, is I have them create location-based reminders of their goals for the day, or who they want to be, what their presence is in a certain situation, so for example, when I go to a certain location, like when my phone gets near the front door of my office, I’ll get a text message telling me I want to be this way today, or these are my macro goals, or that this is my larger why to kind of help keep things in perspective. So there are other ways to do it where you can kind of almost hack your brain and hack your. Or your emotions, so it’s not just about getting tasks done. There are larger things that can be done with it as well.

Ari Meisel: Exactly.

Zack Arnold: So we’re just about out of time, because I want to be very, very respectful of your productivity and your batching. Is there anything else that my listeners can walk away with saying, “All right, this is where I need to start if I really want to take control of my day and start getting rid of unnecessary tasks and things to do.

Ari Meisel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so well, first of all, everyone should check out Less doing.com and the podcast, I think, is a really great resource. It’s very up to date, but my book, The Art of Less Doing, really does provide a framework for getting more done in your life and your business. But the most exciting thing now for me is that we have the Less Doing Virtual Assistants, which is they’re the most capable on demand basically project managers in the world. They’re all trained by me in my methods, and they can do anything. We haven’t had to turn down a single project yet, and we’re changing people’s lives and businesses every day.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I can just about guarantee I’m going to be one of those people that jumps in and signs up, because I thought I had everything put together, and then I started reading your book, and looking at this, and like, oh, I’ve got a long ways to go. I’m like, I’m like maybe a yellow or a blue belt in the world of productivity. I’m ready to be a black belt ninja in productivity, and that you would be the guy to go to if that’s where you want to get the training.

Ari Meisel: Awesome.

Zack Arnold: So, that being the case, I hope everybody checks out those resources. And, Ari, it has been a tremendous, tremendous pleasure to have you on the show.

Ari Meisel: Thank you so much.

Zack Arnold

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