I have so much free time. __Said no one, ever.__ But if someone were to _ever_ _dare_ utter those words, it would be my friend. We’ll call her Ingrid. Ingrid’s one of those people who make you wonder: > If everyone has the same number of hours in the day, why does she seem to get so much more done than anyone else? It’s __definitely NOT__ from the lack of commitments. Ingrid’s got 4 kids. A husband who works market hours from LA. She’s currently out raising a Series A during the pandemic. She exercises and meditates every day. And yes, she does wake up at 4:45 am – but she goes to bed by 9:45. (That’s 7 hours, if you’re counting.) Yet every time we speak, she’s totally present. She asks me tons of questions about my family. She recalls the tiniest details (_remember the time you wanted to start an events company?_) about my life. And even when things are awry at her start-up, she’s _lucid in her stress_. I once Ingrid how she defined success. And without a hint of hesitation she said: _“Me and my family’s health.”_ And her next three words shook me to my core: > _“Never feeling rushed.”_ * * * If time is the currency of achievement, why are some able to cash in their allocation for more chips than others? And in a world of rapid fire Slack messages, daily episodes of _The Daily_ and Zoom calls up the wazoo – who on earth has the right to__not feel rushed?__ _Wait But Why’s_ Tim Urban offers a clue. As one of my blogging idols, Urban has the deft ability to crank out 10,000 word posts (like [this one]() on career change) that double as free life coaching sessions. And here’s a clue into his baffling prolific-ness:

Digging into the mentions, it becomes quite clear why he _just doesn’t use Google Drive_.

In the book _No BS Time Management,_ Dan Kennedy has an entire chapter dedicated to the evil forces that __make us feel rushed all the dang time.__ Look no further than the name of chapter two itself: > _How to Drive a Stake Through the Hearts of the Time Vampires Out to Suck You Dry_ And Kennedy’s concluding _Time Truth:_

* * * There’s one thing you’ll never see in a casino. __A clock.__ And that’s good business – if you’re the dealer. The iconic management thinker Peter Drucker famously said: > _What gets measured, gets managed._ You actually do this already – the Peloton Leaderboard, a Headspace streak or the star chart that rewards your 6 year old’s good behavior. A bunch of my homies have this Bluetooth-enabled _doo-hicky_ on their desks.

It’s the _Timular Time Tracker_ and it lets you easily account for your time so that your days don’t disappear like the clock-less casino. But are you ready for __time-tracking with a twist?__ When I first hired my business coach, he asked me for an audit of my time. But there was a catch. He wanted to see the hours organized as follows: * $10 per hour work * $100/hr work * $1,000/hr work * $10,000/hr work

The book-ends of this exercise rocked me. In the $10 category there was the constant re-scheduling Zoom calls, formatting Keynotes, responding to YouTube comments, and gathering my 1099s. (My coaching and consulting was split in the middle two categories.) But $10,000/hr? __Come on dawg, the top law partners at Skadden bill $1,500 an hour.__ But whether you’re a business owner, executive or manager – there absolutely are daily actions that could have $10,000 outcomes in the future. You could: * Recruit a VP of Sales * Incubate a breakthrough new product * Create a world-class management training program * “Disrupt” your own career by learning an entire new skill * Learn how to delegate using Upwork, virtual assistants and No-code tools * Become great at public speaking * Take specific steps to shape the culture of your firm When you break the code of extremely successful people like Ingrid, you realize that they have an __unwavering commitment__ to $10,000/hr work. And it’s not necessarily profit-driven – they’re simply __deliberate in playing the long game__. * * * E.B White wrote: > “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” This succinctly captures the our daily tension as well-intentioned day spiral out of our control… minutes after our alarms go off.

Should you… * Put out today’s fire or plant a seed for tomorrow? * Be perfectly present with your child or do a task that fattens their 529 plan? * Should you give the hamster wheel another good twirl or pursue more purposeful work that energizes you? In the NYT article [productivity isn’t about time management, it’s about attention management]() Wharton Professor (and longtime RadReader) Adam Grant sheds some light into Ingrid’s unique mindset: > _I’ve found that productive people don’t agonize about which desire to pursue. They go after both simultaneously, gravitating toward projects that are personally interesting and socially meaningful._ Which brings me to a peculiar recent discovery of mine. This discovery touches three of my favorite activities: surfing, writing and meditation. I found that in these activities, __When I apply more effort, the output decreases.__ I cannot _impose my will_ into writing a great email. When I paddle furiously into a wave – _I don’t catch it._ __Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself.__ In Daosim, they call this “Wu Wei” or __Effortless Action.__ You may know it as Flow. Or the Zone. Rowers refer to it as __swing__ : > _The swing carries us; We do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed_. Ingrid’s days are __rich with swing.__ She’s found her _Wu Wei_ – and I’m on the hunt for mine.