How to Do Less and Live More featuring Ari Meisel

Rob Kosberg:

Hey, welcome, everybody. Rob Kosberg here. I am excited to bring you another interview with a great best-selling author, Ari Meisel. He just had a new book launch this week. We’ll talk a little bit about Ari’s books. Ari’s a self-described overwhelmologist and the founder of Less Doing. He helps entrepreneurs who have the opportunity in excess of what their infrastructure can support to find focus, flexibility, and freedom in their business. I’ve read a number of your books, Ari. Idea to Execution was really, really good. The Art of Less Doing, very cool. Of course, more recently, you have a new one out, so we’ll talk a bit about that. But welcome to you, my friend.

Ari Meisel:

Thank you very much for having me. 

Rob Kosberg:

Tell me, you obviously are not slowing down in the writing of your books, as we can see with a new one coming out now. So, what is there to write about? What’s the latest focus of your most recent launch?

Ari Meisel: 

It’s funny. I think that this might be my 12th book, and every time I’m like, “This is going to be the last one. This is going to be the last one.” And I said that this time, but this was one of the first books where I felt like it had to be written for me. It’s meant to be my master’s thesis on productivity. It’s called On Productivity. One of the biggest things that I’ve learned throughout the different iterations of the books is the difference between being timely and timeless. There are some really important instances where a book needs to be timely and deal with something that’s sort of topical, and contextual, and contemporary. Then there are other times where timeless matters.

So my very first book came out almost seven years ago now. There are apps, companies, and tools, and I mention a lot that some of them don’t exist anymore. Some of them are not what I recommend anymore. I really made that conscious shift to try to have a book that’s more about mindset. And how you approach productivity on a grander scale with very little mention of specific tools to be more timeless.

Rob Kosberg:

Love it. I love that idea. I love the contrast between being timely and timeless. I think most people would say that they would love to write something timeless, right? Something that doesn’t just impact people at the time, at this moment. But who knows? Years, maybe generations from now too.

Ari Meisel:

Yeah, and I think that that also changes how you promote it, and how you do the launch, and how you utilize it as a tool in your business. Because if it is timely, you have to put a lot more into a more significant launch and make the most of six months or whatever it might be instead of the other way around.

Rob Kosberg:

Love it. Love it. Give me some of the main concepts of On Productivity. Everybody has their uniqueness, their magic, the way they think about things. This is something that you’ve studied for a long, long time. What are some of the key points in productivity, and how to think about it?

Ari Meisel:

Having done this for over a decade with thousands of people, hundreds of companies, in hundreds of industries, I’ve found that productivity is one of those spaces where there is so much bad advice. There’s so much garbage and so much regurgitation of other things that other people said that didn’t even work in the first place! The big problem with it is that you have that in all sorts of industries, but in productivity, it’s one of those things where you have people starved for an in, a hack, a tip, a secret. Some way that they can get more done in less time, and they’ll grab on to anything. It’s a problem, and you get people taking terrible advice that doesn’t help them. And then somehow, again, when it comes to productivity mainly, when they fail at it, they assume it’s them and that they just didn’t get the system right. They’re just not a productive person.

An excellent example of that is an amazing system that I have a lot of respect for: Getting Things Done, David Allen’s system. It’s been around forever! And he’s a genius, and he’s been on the podcast and my podcast. It’s a great system, but it doesn’t work for a lot of people. A lot of people’s brands just don’t work that way, and when it doesn’t work for them, it’s like, “Well, it has to be me. I’ve tried this, I’ve tried that, I’ve tried that, and it’s just this thing that’s wrong with me.”

So one of the things that I try to do with my approach is to look at how you do what you do now, which sounds simple and obvious, but many of us don’t do that. We go through the day, we go through the motions, we go through the processes, and we just do them because that’s how we’ve always done them. Most people just don’t take the chance to stop and look at how or why. And many times, you don’t need any particular productivity system, or method, or knowledge. You just have to have some awareness of how you’re spending your time. So I can give you a particular, concrete example of that.

Rob Kosberg:

Please.

Ari Meisel:

So if you had to guess, Rob, if you had to guess how many steps are required on average to pay a bill, what would you say?

Rob Kosberg:

Five?

Ari Meisel:

Great guess. The number’s 23.

Rob Kosberg:

Wow. That sucks.

Ari Meisel:

But the reason I say great guess is because most people, I’d say 90% of the people who answer that question, guess under ten. Seven, eight, nine, ten, or whatever. Here’s the thing, Rob, when you pay a bill, there very well may be five steps to you because you’ve done it for such a long time. The problem is when you try to explain to somebody else who works for you, or a partner or whatever, how to do it, you’re only going to explain those five steps. You’re going to leave out the other eighteen. And then they’re going to try to get into it. They’re going to screw up. They’re going to get frustrated. They’re not going to go, “Why?” And when you handed it off to them, you subconsciously expected them to do a better job than you had done because that’s what delegation’s all about. 

Right? It’s a recipe for disaster. And then you have people who are like, “Oh, I tried outsourcing or delegating, and it doesn’t work.”

I don’t do that anymore, but that’s just a basic example. So if someone were actually like, “Hey, why don’t you write down the steps required to pay a bill for you? What does that actually look like?” And five sounded right to you, but if you think about it, let’s say it’s a physical bill. Many bills are not now, but you get the physical bill. What do you do with it? Do you have to scan it? Do you have to send it to your account? Do you have to save it to a Dropbox folder? What do you have to do with the bill? And then I got to go to my banking website. 

I’ve got to log in. If they’re not already in the system, I have to add them as a payee. 

This is how I do that. This is the account I’m going to use. This is the data I want to pay it with. Pretty soon, you might be looking at twenty-three steps. They add up very quickly. 

But when we try to offload or delegate, or just do it ourselves, we shortcut things. 

So, you don’t see those steps. My original framework on Less Doing was to optimize, automate, outsource. So optimize first, automate second, and then outsource last, if ever! 

And that optimize is the biggest thing, and it really does just comes down to identification, tracking, looking at how you do what you do now. I can’t tell you, and I know this is a run-on, run-on, run-on, but I have some really high-level private clients that I work with. One of them right now, pretty much all that person does is send me a screenshot of their calendar every day, and we discuss it. They have a very jam-packed calendar, but often they’ll send me the picture, and just from looking at it, they’ll be like, “Oh, right. I shouldn’t have that meeting there, and this was too long.” It’s just that awareness that’s missing a lot of times. The overwhelm is just being underwater and not be able to see what’s happening.

Rob Kosberg:

Interesting. I love the whole idea of gaining awareness. A lot of what you’re talking about is the productivity of a business regarding outsourcing. But some things you’re not outsourcing. You’re not outsourcing the writing of your books. I would love to hear your productive methodology around your writing. Around your content creation. Because you’ve got your podcast, you have your books, you have workbooks. You have a ton of content that you’re creating, and that is no easy thing!

Ari Meisel:

The books have been written in the recent past through a process of delegation and outsourcing. So I wouldn’t call my writer a ghostwriter. I wouldn’t say that. It’s a woman named Amy Randolph, who is incredibly talented. She’s been working with me for years. I like writing, and I think that I’m good at it. I’m maybe not amazing at it, and I’m definitely not very efficient at it. And I will also never reread a draft that I write. That’s not me. So what I try to tell people a lot of times is that you have to get the content out. The content is more important than anything in some cases if it really is helpful content. Suppose people are producing something that’s useful and interesting that people can benefit from. In that case, I almost feel like you have a duty to get it out there.

But you have tons of people who say, “Oh I’m not a good writer. I just can’t get it. I’m not a good writer. I can’t do this thing.” and I’m sure you particularly hear this all the time Rob. 

It’s like, “Okay, fine. But we still need to know this stuff. We need to get this knowledge out!” 

So I write until it’s annoying, and then I stop, and then I move on to what I do with Amy. 

The way that I work with this particular person, Amy, is I use an app called Voxer, which I feel like you’re probably familiar with. For those who aren’t, Voxer is a voice communication app. 

It’s how I do 99% of my communication. That’s how I talk to my clients, my team members, my wife sometimes. And I have developed a relationship with Amy at this point where I can basically talk for 5 or 10 minutes. From that, she can write a 2,000, 3,000-word article or whatever it might be. This last book was basically like 30 or 40 Voxer messages that I sent to Amy over the course of three weeks. She would get that, she would write it, give it back to me. I’d read it, we’d talk about it, and then we’d get it done. That’s how this particular book was written. It’s such an interesting refinement process because having her interpret it and write it, give it back to me, and seeing my own words being sort of reinterpreted crystallizes the content so much. It really is that optimization. It is looking at how it’s done and how it’s said because it’s too easy to write something in a vacuum and say to yourself, “Oh, this is brilliant. This is so good!.” If you work in a vacuum, it might be terrible, and you don’t really know that. 

You can’t read the label from inside the jar, right?

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah.

Ari Meisel:

So, that’s how this last book came to be. Actually, that’s how, to a lesser extent, Replaceable Founder was created as well. Not broken up as much. But the content is the content, as far as I’m concerned. The written form is one of the ways that people really enjoy consuming it. 

And if you’re not able to produce that yourself, you have to figure out where to get it done.

Rob Kosberg:

Right. Well, everybody reading this is thinking to themselves, “Man, I want an Amy!” She sounds amazing!

Ari Meisel:

She doesn’t work just for me. She’s for hire.

Rob Kosberg:

Well, the interesting thing is, it sounds like you’ve been working with her for 10 years. Soyou’ve also developed an incredible rapport. I’d like to hear a little bit more about your Voxer messages. Because there must be more to the Voxer message than meets the eye. 

For somebody to take a Voxer message, any message, and change that into 2,000 or 3,000 words. Is there a methodology or a format you follow with your Voxer messages to her?

Ari Meisel:

Yes. It’s a great question. Let me just answer that sort of in a roundabout way. Because it’s an important context for people to have. I have worked with several New York Times best-selling authors in terms of being more efficient. One of the things that often comes up is they’re like, “Oh, I’ve tried delegating my writing before, but they just can’t capture my voice.” And 100% of the time, it’s like, “Well, how did you give them what you wanted them to write?” And 100% of the time, they’re like, “Well, I wrote out this thing.” And I was like, “Oh, you wrote it, but you want them to get your voice?” I was like, “So why not talk? Why not give them your voice?” It sounds simple, but it makes a big difference to deliver it that way.

So Voxer is an essential tool for this. Again, intonation, passion, and the drama that comes through with the voice are just very different from if you were trying to give somebody a written brief. Especially if you’re already identifying yourself as somebody who doesn’t write efficiently or effectively! So, that’s one really crucial thing. Give them your voice.

With the books, we work together to come up with the outline, and then Amy is prompting me over Voxer with, “So, this is the next one? Why don’t you tell me about this, and this, and this?” I wouldn’t call it an interview, but it’s like a primer. We come up with the outline together, she’ll ask me a question or two, and then I just go! Usually, it’s while I’m driving, I’m doing something else, and I just go! And it’s raw, and really unedited, and totally unfiltered. And then she can mold that. I would say that when she gives me the first draft back, I probably may change 3% of it, and then we’re good!

Rob Kosberg:

That’s impressive. That’s beautiful. The ghostwriting interview process is nothing new. The ghostwriter asks a few questions, but gosh, the vast majority of the time, that creates total crap! There’s content, but there’s no context often to that content. I know this personally because that’s the way I wrote my very first book 13 years ago. It was terrible. I threw it away and ended up writing it myself, which took another 18 months, which was like pulling teeth.

Do you tell stories as well within these Voxer messages? Will you give a case study to emphasize the point you’re trying to make in that particular chapter? Or will you tell a story to develop some context around the subject matter? Or is that something that she is kind of formulating herself?

Ari Meisel:

It’s all stories, basically, for the most part. One of the really lovely things about Voxer is that I can do it anywhere, anytime. I’m never scheduling a time to do the next chapter or whatever. It’s always, “Something just happened, and it’s relevant, and I’m going to talk about it now, and you can basically make something great out of this.” The truth is that, at least with Amy and me, she’s been working with me for long enough. She knows the system. She knows about Less Doing, and she knows the principles and how we outsource. She knows all that stuff. So it’s really just about me adding those stories that make it really relevant and hopefully timeless in the same way. I have all the recordings. Some of them really are like rants. Something just sets me off and what I have to say about it just comes out. This is great because I feel like business books, particularly, and nonfiction books often lack that emotion. They don’t necessarily lack stories. I mean, you have a Malcolm Gladwell book with incredible stories! But even those books, I think, to some extent, lack some emotion. And the feeling really comes through this way.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah. I love it. I love talking to smart people and learning their methodology.

 Man, I was totally hoping you would tell me that it’s all stories because the first thing I’m going to do when we’re done is go buy On Productivity. Because now I want to learn the productivity, but I also want to match it up with the methodology you did in creating it. 

I want to see what this looks like. Very, very cool. Thank you for sharing that. That’s super helpful for people!

Ari Meisel:

The fun thing for me is just that my system is. It’s very widely applicable. I’ve just been very fortunate. I’ve been able to work with every industry imaginable—everything from industrial manufacturing situations, to the U.S. Army, to Fortune 500 companies, celebrities. 

There have definitely been some fun stories along the way!

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, and who doesn’t want to be more productive? We always feel like, “Oh, we’re notas productive as we can be.”

Ari Meisel:

For me, the other thing is that I do very few actual minutes of work in a given day. That’s just the way that I’m set up to do this. And all of my coaching are done asynchronously over Voxer, so I don’t have any scheduled appointments. I have four small children, all of them nine and under. We just moved into this new house. We’re doing a lot of work. 

I’m talking to you from my woodworking shop, but this is not a hobby for me. This is hard work. I’m also an EMT, a volunteer EMT. So I live a lot of life, and there are many stories that come out of that because I see inefficiency everywhere. 

Rob Kosberg:

Very cool. Let’s switch gears for one second. We talk a lot about how you get your magic onto the pages. Thank you for sharing it. Your books are helping tons and tons of people. How have your books and your content helped you? How has it helped you to grow your authority and attract clients?

Ari Meisel:

I feel like even though a lot of people know now that you can vanity-publish and you can self-publish, there’s still something about having a book you’ve created that I think definitely lends considerable credibility. There’s undoubtedly something about having multiple books. 

That’s always been nice as well. It’s just a really low barrier to cross for people to find out more about who you are. It’s like, “Don’t judge a book by a cover? Great. So buy the book and find out who they are.” It gives you that sort of insight into what they do, how they operate, at least in this kind of world, in this kind of business.

So the book, I would say, has been maybe one of the most instrumental tools in some ways. 

I mean, the podcast I think, has been perfect for me as well. But every day, somebody is like, “Oh, I got your book five years ago, and I knew that someday I’d be good enough, or I’d be successful enough that I could hire you as a coach.” I’ve gotten those messages from people. 

It’s amazing. People give the books as gifts. My first book was translated into like seven other languages! So the South Korean version was the most beautiful, I have to say. So, it’s been very important.

Rob Kosberg:

Regarding that, you’re getting emails. You’re getting messages. Are you actively using your books? A lot of it is what I would say is reactive, meaning that people are reading it. You don’t even know they’re reading it. It’s on their desk. They got it five years ago, and they’re reaching out to you. Any kind of active use of it? Do you give it away on your podcast? 

Ari Meisel:

Yeah. For a long time, I was giving it away on the podcast. I’ve done that, and I thought that was very useful. I believe I still have it set up so that you can get the first chapter of any of the books free, either on Medium or by signing up for an email. And then people will buy it from there if they want, or they’ll just skip the line and move on to something else.

On Productivity is the last book that came out, but two weeks ago, we put out The Ultimate KPI Planner. There are a million planners out there, but this is something very specific planner built around a framework that I created. And if they buy the book, in the very back page of the book, there’s a QR code that they can scan, which gives them access to a private Voxer chat with me. That’s one of the active promotions right now, which has actually worked really, really well. It was like, “Buy the planner, get this  bonus content that you haven’t seen before.”

Rob Kosberg:

Very cool. I could see people buying the planner just to get access. Right?

Ari Meisel:

Yeah.

Rob Kosberg:

I mean, that’s a great marketing strategy right there. Love that!

Ari Meisel:

And it’s super easy! What I would just tell people if you’re going to do that, make sure that you use a URL shortener so that if you want to change it at some point, you can! So I actually own less.do for Less Doing, which is amazing. It’s a Dominican Republic domain name, which is awesome. And I can do less.do/ “something.” It’s less.do/planner. So right now, that points to this Voxer thing, but I could make it point anywhere I want to, at some point in time!

Rob Kosberg:

Perfect. Perfect. Love it. Anything else, Ari? I mean, I obviously want to know where people can find you? You just told me about less.do, but where can people go to get more information? 

I know you have a podcast. That’s great. Tell us where people can learn a little bit more.

Ari Meisel:

I have a brand-new, redone website. So everything is at lessdoing.com. They can check it out there. The podcast, the books, the courses, the coaching, everything they want. If anyone wants to reach out on Voxer, you can go to voxwithari.com.

Rob Kosberg:

Nice. Nice. Voxwithari.com or lessdoing.com.

Ari Meisel:

Yeah.

Rob Kosberg:

Fantastic, man. Hey, thanks for your generosity. Love the things that you shared. I love the whole Voxer strategy. I think people can use that and I appreciate you taking the time to do this interview.

Ari Meisel:

Thanks for having me.