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Transcript
- 03:00 About Ari Meisel
- 06:38 Less Doing, More Living
- 07:29 Optimizing, Automating, Outsourcing
- 09:16 Segmenting Email and How To Go About It
- 11:31 Automating Your External Brain: Using Evernote
- 14:43 Why You Want to get a Virtual Assistant
- 17:45 Useful Tools for Automating Your Life
- 19:46 Programs and Consultations Offered by Ari Meisel
- 21:34 Automating Relationships
- 23:16 Sugar as the Most Pressing Issue in the World Today
Wendy Myers: Hello and welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find me on myersdetox.com and you can find this video podcast on the YouTube channel, WendyLiveto110 and on the corresponding blog post on my website, myersdetox.com. So I hope you want to live a long time because I’m going to be saying “live to 110” over and over and over during the podcast.
But today, we have Ari Meisel on the show. I met him when we were both presenting at the Bulletproof Biohackers Conference put on by Dave Asprey last year. It was an amazing experience and Ari Meisel was talking about how to automate your life, how to outsource and how to optimize a lot of processes in your life to reduce stress.
So I asked him to come on the podcast and talk about all his tips and techniques and suggestions because all the tips that he recommended to me, I couldn’t believe how much simpler it made my life and how much it did reduce my stress just automating a few simple tasks in my life, even organizing your email a little bit better. And so I wanted to have him come on the show to talk about how to do less to reduce stress.
Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, so please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any suggestion that we talk about today on the show.
I am thrilled to announce my new online health program called Body Bio Rehab. You can find that at BodyBioRehab.com. This has been a brain child for many months in the making and it will be debuting April 1st.
We talk about a lot of heady concepts on the podcast and it’s really not to everyone’s tastes. Some people just want to start with the basics. So I wanted to create an online, basic program that goes over diet, supplementation, of course, detoxification, exercising. They’re little videos of me exercising, not exercise that’s too stressful, but just the right amount to keep your body fit and tone and get your circulation going.
Additionally, we’re going to be talking about how to reduce stress. I think stress is one of the number one killers in our society today and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today on the show.
So I’m really thrilled to bring this to you, guys. It’s just a simple online 30-day program doing a 30-day Paleo reset and then transitioning into the Modern Paleo diet. We’ll be debuting a cookbook as well, The Modern Paleo Cookbook, so that you can cook all the recipes in the 30-day meal plan.
I’m really thrilled to bring this to you, guys so if you want to sign up to learn about it when it launches, go to BodyBioRehab.com and sign up.
So today on the podcast, we have Ari Meisel. I want to talk a little bit about his background. He founded LessDoing.com, a fantastic website.
In 2006, he developed a painful chronic autoimmune condition of the gut called Crohn’s Disease. After taking a dozen medications and several hospitalizations, he committed to doing whatever it took to overcome his disease. I really commend him for that because today, he has been declared free of the disease.
Through a combination of yoga, nutrition, natural supplements and rigorous exercise, he was able to fight back the symptoms of Crohn’s and now is free of the disease today.
He also competed in Ironman France in 2011. That’s some vigorous exercise for you. It’s a very admirable feat; it’s very difficult to do. And so for him, when he was dealing with the disease, he decided that he needed to reduce his stress as much as possible and organize his life. And while he was dealing with this, he developed a system called Less Doing.
Through the process of data collection, self tracking and analysis, he developed a system called Less Doing at LessDoing.com. This is a system dealing with the daily stresses of life by optimizing, automating and outsourcing all of one’s tasks in life and business.
Now, he focuses on achievement architecture, helping individuals and companies to be more effective at everything.
Wendy Myers: Well, all right. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Ari Meisel: Thanks for having me, Wendy. It’s a pleasure to speak to you.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little about how you started LessDoing.com and tell us a little bit about your story.
Ari Meisel: Sure, so I have been an entrepreneur most of my life and for the last 14 years, I’ve primarily been a real estate developer. Nine years ago, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, which some of your listeners might be familiar with, but if not, it’s a chronic inflammatory condition that affects the digestive tract. And it’s very painful, I was on a lot of medicine and I got really sick. And after turning things around, through a long process, I got off my meds. And I was on my way to training for Iron Man France.
And while I was doing that, I realized that the nutrition, the supplements, and the fitness aspects of what was going on with my illness were actually pretty straightforward. I replicated my results in dozens of other Crohn’s patients at this point, but the hard part was managing stress. And my response to that, oddly enough, was to create a new system of productivity, which I would call Less Doing, More Living. So I basically have spent the last few years, helping people to optimize, automate, and outsource everything in their life, including their health in order to be more effective.
Wendy Myers: I loved your book. I first met you at the Bulletproof Biohackers Conference and saw your speech there, your presentation. And I was really taken aback because why hadn’t I heard of these useful tools and I had to do all these stuff. I was writing everything down and I implemented a lot of your suggestions and it really has increased my productivity a lot and reduced my stress. Because I have a website and it’s a tremendous amount of work, managing employees, doing that kind of stuff, I was at that point where I needed to start delegating and outsourcing and just preserving every minute that I possibly could. So I really found your website and your book extremely helpful.
Ari Meisel: Thank you so much.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your book Less Doing, More Living?
Ari Meisel: So the book is called Less Doing, More Living: How to Make Everything in Life Easier. Basically it shows the nine fundamentals of the Less Doing System starting with what I call the 80-20 rule, but it’s really about self-tracking and identifying these steps that we go through, the various processes in our lives. Through the external brain, it goes on to batching, organization, choosing your own work week is something I call, figuring out your own biorhythms.
And then ends with wellness, basically, as the ninth fundamentally capstone. No matter how technologically efficient you might be able to become, if you’re not sleeping well, not eating right, and are too stressed out, you’re not going to be as effective as you can be. There are a few others in there, but basically the book explains the nine fundamentals of the system.
Wendy Myers: And can we go a little bit into the first segment in your book about optimizing, automating, and outsourcing? Let’s talk about the first concept which is about optimizing.
Ari Meisel: Yeah. The overarching methodology is sort of how I approach any problem, like a business or a health problem and that is optimize, automate, and outsource. And the reason that it’s so important is that anybody can outsource anything nowadays. You can have somebody pick up your dry cleaning, you can pay somebody in a far off country to do your copy writing. And it’s very easy to outsource.
But the problem is, when you go to outsourcing, first, you’re actually not making the process more efficient. If anything, it’s like you’re sweeping the dirt under the rug. So it’s all about optimizing. For me, optimizing is about tracking and in that regard, it’s really about identifying how you’re spending your time, money, and resources because I feel like I’ve become an overwhelmologist. Every day, I hear somebody is overwhelmed. And a lot of that being overwhelmed comes from being inundated with too many inputs and outputs and just not knowing what’s actually happening.
One of the questions I always love to ask people when I do a talk is, “Raise your hand really quickly if you can remember what you had for breakfast this morning.” And usually, everybody raises their hand. And I say, “Okay, do the same thing if you can tell me how many emails you sent last Tuesday.” And nobody raises their hand to that. And the answer then is “maybe that doesn’t matter,” but maybe it does because that is your information. That is what’s happening to you. And wouldn’t it be nice to be aware of the pockets of time that you spend most of your time on your day, or on your email, or what your most and least productive days are and the factors that go into that.
Wendy Myers: I thought that was very interesting. Can you talk a little about segmenting your email and how you should go about approaching your email? I’m addicted to my phone and I literally answer emails all day long. I haven’t implemented some of your suggestions. I need to do that. I’m going to do that soon. It’s amazing how long and how much time you can spend distracted and not focus on tasks that you should be doing because you’re constantly wanting to get on your email.
Ari Meisel: Well, the main problem with email for a lot of people is that they don’t take the approach that you need to deal with email only once. For them, it’s read it, think about it, come back or don’t come back to it, that’s just going to be there for later. It’s a really bad approach and the problem is that more stuff is being done via email. Even relatively socially-disconnected people are getting a lot more email than they ever were before.
So the email policy that I have is what I call the three Ds. You can either delete it, because it’s no longer relevant (doesn’t reply or respond for you or is simply spam). The second one is deal with it. If you can deal with it right now, like in five minutes, then just do it now. Don’t put it off or come back to it, just do it. This includes delegating it to someone else. And the third one is most interesting, deferring. And deferring would be to put that email off, out of your inbox, but pushing it off to a time when you can be more efficient in dealing with it. That is not procrastinating, which is just not wanting to do it. Deferring is taking an active decision to say, “I can more effectively deal with this issue at this time.” And the tool that I like to recommend for that is followup.cc where you can simply forward the email to any time period you want at followup.cc and it’ll come back to you at that time.
Wendy Myers: I actually heard you talk about that during your presentation at the Bulletproof Biohackers Conference. I thought it was so interesting because you do get all these emails that you have to address at another time. And it’s typical to keep track of a hundred emails that have tasks attached to them. And I thought it was really useful to have a reminder.
Ari Meisel: Yes, thank you.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you talk a little bit about the concept of automating your external brain? I really liked this concept. How do you go about expanding your brain and using tools to help you to automate things?
Ari Meisel: The concept of the external brain is that the human mind is really good at coming up with ideas, but it’s very bad at holding onto them and even worse so at executing them a lot of times. So you need a repository for all these ideas. And you also need to create idea flow.
So there’s a number of tools you can use for this, and in my opinion, none of them are going to be as good as something like Evernote. And Evernote is a free app or desktop service where you can keep notes of every form, whether it’s writing, voice recording, video, sound, anything you want really. The idea though with Evernote is to overuse it. It’s a free resource and you can just bloat in it as much stuff as you want. So if you have an idea, you don’t want to judge it or hesitate. Just get it out of your head. Any of these thoughts, any article you find interesting, any YouTube video you think is cool, just capture it to EverNote. And just move on from it, don’t even worry about it.
The way EverNote works is just so genius. As you build up a repository of knowledge in there, you basically start having more relevant stuff to look at. So from then on, anything you click or add to it, it’ll pop up and show you relevant notes from your EverNote. And the thing that’s so powerful about that is I may have had an idea two years ago and saw an article that I thought was interesting six months ago. And then today, somebody sends me a YouTube video that’s really cool and I save it and it pops up and says, “Here is a note from your EverNote that you did from two years ago, and an article from six months ago that are relevant to what you’re looking at right now.” And I might have my next business idea relevant to just that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I have to say, EverNote changed my life. And I started using it right after I heard your presentation. Because I constantly take notes and I’m just doing it in my phone and my notebook, and it’s very inefficient. EverNote, you can take pictures of the web, little web clippings that you see on a website would have your ideas, that you would like. It’s really unbelievable. And really, for me it’s just jotting down ideas and organizing them and being able to search them. It made my life so much easier.
Ari Meisel: And the thing is, even if you don’t search them, just getting them off of your mind, it really does free up space for you to think of other things. What I find with a lot of people is sometimes they’re so overwhelmed sometimes, or are so in the dark with what they’re even using their brains for. They don’t even know what some of those possibilities are that they could be using their brain for. It’s pretty awakening for some people.
Wendy Myers: I’m constantly coming up with ideas, but if I don’t write it down, it’s just gone forever. I can’t recall it. And I think a lot of people have that same problem. Especially if they’re really busy.
Ari Meisel: I’m the same way. I need to find a way to record all the conversations my wife and I have to EverNote so that I don’t mistake things.
Wendy Myers: Yes, so why don’t we tell the listeners a little bit about why you want to get a virtual assistant? I love my virtual assistant. I actually have two assistants that help me with various things. Why don’t you tell people about how inexpensive it can be to get a virtual assistant and why you should get one?
Ari Meisel: Sure. Are you using a service or an individual?
Wendy Myers: I found somebody on oDesk.
Ari Meisel: I think everybody should work with a virtual assistant at some point in their life or their career. Because it’s an educational process for you in terms of how you communicate your needs. The thing is, proper delegation is a kind of a lost art. Like, the ad executive dictating letter to his or her secretary, probably his secretary at the time, doesn’t happen anymore. Dictation is a skill set that most people don’t have anymore. When you’re working on a virtual system, it’s a really interesting parameter. When you’re working with somebody you’ve never met and has no training in what you do. In certain cases of virtual assistant services I’ll recommend, you may never speak to that person again. That’s a really cool parameter to put on you in terms of how to be more effective in the way you communicate and it makes you better.
Basically, there’s two kinds of virtual systems: on-demand and dedicated. So you have a dedicated system where you’ll always deal with the same person and they get to know you and your habits, which is great. But there’s also another world of existence, which is the on-demand type of assistance. And right now, the service I’d recommend for that is Fancy Hands. I don’t know their current price is but it’s relatively very cheap. And with the on-demand service, you have access to thousands of assistants in a sort of general pool. So you put your task out there by email or phone, and they pick it up and do it. And if you have your processes well-described, you can have anything done by an on-demand assistant.
I have not had a dedicated assistant in three years and I do an average of 250 tasks a month. The nice thing there is that I can issue 10 tasks in 10 minutes and 10 different assistants will start working on it right away and everything might be done in the next 20 minutes. Whereas with a dedicated assistant, here she could definitely do that but then that will be one task at a time. And you get 24/7 access. And you have people from a variety of backgrounds who may be able to offer some inside knowledge to get that task done more effectively. But again, just keep in mind though that outsourcing is the last step. And a lot of times, you don’t even need to get there.
Wendy Myers: I need to get me some fancy hands because there is a bottleneck. When you have an assistant, they only have so many hours in a week and they may be working with other people. Sometimes I want to get more things done more quickly. So that’s an amazing resource.
Ari Meisel: Yeah, absolutely.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about what your favorite tools are? Some of the things you mentioned at the Biohackers Conference, some of the things you like personally to increase and automate productivity?
Ari Meisel: Sure, so followup.cc, that’s one of the top tools that I like to use and you can use that for many platforms to never worry again about following up on emails and whether they got back to you or not. Another one though is IFTTT and in that same vein is Zapier. They’re almost identical services but they work with different web services. And what they do is very simple automations. If this happens here, do this over here. It can be as simple as if I change my profile picture on Twitter, then also change it on Facebook. Or more complicated, if I make a sale on Paypal, then add that person as a new contact to my InfusionSoft CRM system so that I follow up with them. Or if I add a file to this particular folder in Dropbox, then send an email to my copywriter in Malaysia to have them start working on this thing, whatever it might be.
It’s the kind of thing that would take you 45 seconds, maybe a minute to do yourself, but you’re doing them hundreds of times a day. And this just saves so much of that effort. Plus, you can create this domino chain of things that happen so the entire process can become automated. And that’s my playground. I love that kind of stuff and how to completely automate these processes. The most recent one was— we have a babysitter for our three kids. She generally works for a store during the day, but if we need her to do something for us at night, like a dinner or a special thing that I have to make her aware of. So if I put something on my calendar and add “#babysit,” then the Fancy Hands virtual system will call her a week before that event to make sure she puts that in her calendar.
Wendy Myers: Wow, I love that. And it takes time to get all those things in place. So, I think that’s interesting that you have to optimize first. Figure out what you’re doing and what you need to get done and follow through. So how do you help people and entrepreneurs do that? What kinds of programs or consultations do you do with people to help follow those steps?
Ari Meisel: Sure. I used to do individual coaching. I stopped about eight months ago, and I switched to a mastermind coaching format. So now I have a couple of programs. I have a boot camp, which is an eight-week online program where people can basically go through the fundamentals of my system. But a sort of updated version is in person with me on the phone.
And then there’s the mastermind coaching group which is pretty small and high level stuff that we have to work on. I have about 10 to 12 individuals on there right now. And it’s another weekly call over a Facebook group and constantly posting about business issues, personal relationship, diet, biohacking, all that stuff comes up and it’s been really amazing for me. Working with a group has been an eye opener and an educational process for me.
And right now, we’re planning this big, live event in May 1st to 3rd in New York City. Dave Asprey is going to be there as a speaker, Ben Greenfield, [inaudible 00:16:50] and me. It’s going to be a weekend where you will get such actionable stuff that you’ll be able to make your life more productive by the end of the weekend. And that’s at LessDoingLive.com if people want to go check that out. And if they do, they can get a free 45-minute from one of my coaches to get some real value.
Wendy Myers: Yes, I saw that on your website. It looks really, really interesting.
Ari Meisel: Please. We’d love to have you.
Wendy Myers: So I heard you mention something in there where you said that your mastermind group, you’re helping them with some relationship tips? Can we automate our relationship in a way?
Ari Meisel: There are certain things, yes. There’s a service called hassleme.co.uk. It’s a British service but you put in what you want to be reminded of and then you put in an approximate number of days. So, remind me to do this every seven days, then you’ll get an email after five days, another one after nine days. The randomized nature of it can help you get the thing done. So I used to have a thing that was roughly every 10 days, to get my wife flowers. Well, there’s a number of services that can send flowers and that I can say weekly. But that doesn’t become a habit and it’s less romantic.
It’s something that I really want to do, but I also don’t want to make it a chore. So having a randomized nature to it was really good. Sometimes it would pop up every five days, sometimes after ten days. So it was still genuine, but it was randomized to the point that it become sort of fun for me and more real for her. So that’s something for one thing. But there’s all sorts of psychology, biohacking stuff. I think if people meditate a bit more, then they’d probably do better in their relationships. And I am not a perfect example by any means.
Wendy Myers: Well, it sounds like you have the automation down. I know that’s very [inaudible 00:18:52] for the guys out there, you need to send reminders to yourselves to send flowers. Women love that. I think that’s great. I’d like to ask all my guests, “What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?”
Ari Meisel: Stress? Well no, that’s not fair. That’s my deal. Probably sugar, honestly. And sugar was actually interesting problem for me because when I was training for Iron Man. This is before I knew a lot of what I know now about health and wellness, but I was training 25 hours a week. And I was eating nine thousand calories a day at one point and 85% carbs. To say I was a sugar burner, I felt like my body was an inferno and I could just go wherever I wanted. And it’s true when you’re doing that kind of training to some extent because you really are just burning everything. I think I was actually keeping our house warm with my body.
But after Iron Man, by the way, I was Iron Man in France, so recovering from Iron Man in France means a lot of croissants, a lot of [inaudible 00:19:54]. But basically, what happened was as soon as I stopped eating at that level and went back down to what’s more normal for me, which is about four thousand calories a day, I got this massive sugar cravings. And I think it was just the lack of carbs, that I was suddenly depriving myself of. That’s something that’s still sort of present, not that bad at all, but it still pops up in me sometimes when I get stressed or I haven’t slept well. It makes me want to reach out for something sugary sometimes.
Sugar is an inflammatory component. It does all sorts of bad things for you like messing up your sleep and your hormones. It’s hard to avoid for a lot of people because it’s so easy to have something with sugar in it. It’s actually hard a lot of times to find things that don’t have sugar in it. I was looking at the grocery the other day, out of curiosity, at nutrition bars. And I was at WholeFoods which had literally 50 brands I’ve never heard of.
Wendy Myers: It’s a wall.
Ari Meisel: Of nutrition bars, yes. And so the one that is probably the best is the Epic Bar, which are basically beef jerky, but they’re in the form of protein bar. And you have bison and lamb stuff. But even those have dried cranberries in them and they have seven grams of sugar. It’s not terrible, but at the same time, you really can’t find something like that without sugar. So I really think sugar is the most pressing issue.
Wendy Myers: Yes, I think most of my clients have voracious sugar cravings because we’re so stressed out. We have adrenal fatigue and the only way we can get energy is by getting that cheap source, which is sugar. And it all boils down again to stress and fatigue that promotes that. Well, thank you so much for being on the show.
I just love the work that you do and as a busy businessperson myself and health coach, I try to find every tool I can to reduce my stress and your simple suggestions have helped me reduce my stress. And I really highly recommend your book, Less Doing, More Reading. I think it’s a really simple and quick read. You get a lot of tips in there to automate your life and reduce stress. Definitely I highly recommend anyone to go to his website, LessDoing.com. Is there anything else you want to tell the listeners about yourself and what you’re doing?
Ari Meisel: Well, this Less Doing Live event is really my big focus right now. And even if you don’t end up coming to the event, you sign up for one of those coaching calls and we get a lot of feedback that way. And I think that’s very helpful with people that I’ve been doing them with. So LessDoingLive.com. Well, everything else is at LessDoing.com including my podcast.
Wendy Myers: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Ari Meisel: Thank you.
Wendy Myers: That’s it! That’s our show, folks. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast. You can find me on myersdetox.com. You can learn all about how to heal your health conditions naturally, detoxification, all about eating a healthy diet, et cetera, eating real food.
Go check out my new online program that will be up April 1st called BodyBioRehab.com. I’m super excited about that to help as many people as possible for people who don’t want to do my Mineral Power Program. It may be a little bit too much for some people. The Body Bio Rehab will just be these baby steps people need to learn about basic diet, lifestyle and detox that they should be incorporating into their life today.
Again, thanks so much for listening. Don’t hesitate to give a review in iTunes for the Live to 110 Podcast. I’d appreciate that so much. And again, thank you for listening.
