Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire

by Dan Martell

Jonathan had done a fantastic job for nearly a decade cultivating a relationship with his wonderful assistant. He had trained them well, they knew his family, and he trusted them. The last thing he wanted to do was start over with another assistant.

“Don’t think of them as ‘secretaries’ or ‘assistants.’ In fact, they are associates and lifelines.”[1]

Typically, they won’t be scared to tell a customer “no” like you would be, because it’s not really their company.

Use that to your advantage by setting rules, then expecting your assistant to execute.

What if your next marketing hire had an exact Playbook for everything in their department—from ad creation to generating marketing reports? Would you feel more excited to hire a marketer?

you can use a process that allows your team to create their own Playbooks.

Although it’s pretty detailed, it’s not detailed to the screenshot level. It’s written so that someone could go through it and feel mostly trained on all our financial management procedures without me having to get too involved.

Playbook for every major area of my business—from how to hire, to sales, to marketing, and beyond. I even have a Playbook on creating new Playbooks!

Here’s my Playbook on Playbooks. First, there are four essential pieces:

here’s how you use it inside Playbooks: You put all the related videos inside one Playbook.

The next part of a Playbook is the Course.

Here’s how the steps may look:

Notice how none of these steps are too detailed. They simply capture the high-level steps involved.

What high-level information would you want to remind yourself to teach them if you were training them hands-on?

the next thing you need to do is create a section called “Cadence.” (In a simple Playbook, this section may not be necessary.) In this section, you create a list for when every task needs to be completed. Of course, some tasks don’t have any frequency other than “every time.”

Inside each Playbook, I have nonnegotiable checklists. “Did you pull in all reports and ensure they were easily readable for recipients?” “Did you schedule a follow-up call with all missed contacts?” “Did you update the software?” If something goes wrong with a sales report, a follow-up, or an update, and the checklist was followed, then I know the checklist needs to be updated. Then that issue never happens again.

Mark could combine this Playbook with other related Playbooks (like how to conduct one-on-ones, how to do a quarterly review, or how to fire an employee) all in one human resources Playbook.

Let’s walk through an example of creating a financial management Playbook.

Camcorder Method I taught you earlier to have someone else create Playbooks.

someone else on your team—to watch all the videos, then create the Playbook themselves.[*]

Having another individual repeat back what you’ve trained them to do makes identifying those holes far easier.

I record myself doing everything.

Then I have my administrative assistant upload those videos to a b...

When it’s time to transfer that task to someone else—often when I hire a new employee—I tell them to go through the Playbook, watch ...

Then I go over it with them to make sure (A) the Playbook is correct and (B) that t...

Training with the Playbooks is simple—have the new hire go through all the recordings.

Over time, these Playbooks will look quite extensive as you combine one task with another to create function-wide Playbooks. Even with that length, the incoming hire gets their feet wet right from the jump.

training trick is to ask them a few questions at the end, directly from the Playbook, just to ensure they read it.

If you want to scale your company, you must learn how to repeat excellence throughout the organization.

Planning helps achieve a level of efficiency that simply can’t occur with reactivity.

Coaching calls with employees demand one kind of headspace. In these meetings, you may need to be empathetic, soft-spoken, and leader oriented. You also may need certain tools, like a notebook, and you also probably need a specific environment—like an office space. On the other hand, sales calls require an entirely different mentality—you may need to “turn it on” with your personality,

Every time you switch tasks, your brain has to switch focus. Some call this “context switching.”

you stack those meetings on top of each other.

When you create a good working calendar for your week, you’re able to see when your energy dips and when it rises, and at what times of the day you’re most attuned to execute on certain tasks.

start putting tasks in around your energy, you’ll find you get “in the flow” much easier.

Eliminates bleed time: When you plan your week, you are making it clear that there won’t be bleed time, as in: “Whoops, we went over on that interview.” Truthfully, there can’t be bleed time. With a tightly stacked day without any buffer time,

Secret of Task Batching

when you batch similar tasks, you’re able to capitalize on the fact that you’re already in the right state of mind for that type of task.

On a practical level, you’re also in the right place, with the right set of programs and tools you’ll need.

next time you need to approve an ad campaign, ask that all ad campaigns for the next quarter get sent to you at once.

weekly sales calls, plan to do them all, say, every Wednesday and Thursday afternoon.

when we don’t account for all of our time, in black and white, on a calendar, it’s easy to say “yes” to an impromptu meeting, an extra hang-out, or a last-minute errand.

How much energy and time could you buy back, simply by grouping similar tasks together?

By planning my week, I’m not answering emails during my creative time, and I’m not thinking about a podcast interview when I’m conducting my one-on-ones.

able to take the demands of others and route them on my calendar according to preplanned blocks.

don’t anticipate that you’ll nail this the first time around. Likely, it won’t work well the first week or so, but if you iterate on it, it should only take about two or three weeks before you start seeing massive results.

help him stop dreading meetings.

As an introvert, face-to-face time can drain him rapidly,

set up his weekly schedule so that he only took meetings on certain days of the week.

informed his assistant that those days were the only times when meetings could occur. This allowed Hyatt to spend the other days in a clear headspace of creativity.