Steven Farag and I have been talking a lot about the ability to physically leave your business.
With many of our podcast guests, Steven always responds to someone who wants to delegate better by saying, “You should leave Friday early.”
It sounds counterintuitive, right? There’s a concept called Parkinson’s Law that states, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. It means that if you allocate a long time for a simple task, the task will become more complex and time-consuming to fill that period.
In other words, if you give yourself 30 working hours for the week, instead of 50, you will complete the most important tasks and leave the rest.
Why does this matter? If we all fast-forward 5 years in our business, no one wants to still be grinding away, working 50-60 hours a week, doing every task. Let’s be honest, in the long-term, that sounds miserable.
We all want to get to a place with our business where problems self-solve, and we’re managing from the top…but how? We’re formalizing this into the ONE WEEK CHALLENGE.
What is this?
- Every year, you need to plan to leave for 1 week
- I’d recommend starting at a half day on Friday, then a full day, then 2 days, etc.
- You aren’t allowed to check email, work calls, or messages
- Accept that things will go wrong
- Everything that you’re not delegating correctly or don’t have process around
- This forces you to create process, delegate, and hand off before you leave, whereas we normally “just” do it
- The things that go wrong, that’s ok. These are aspects you are bottlenecking to fix when you get back
Your ego is going to fight this. Thinking you need to be there all the time for things to get done.
But remember, we strive for Peak Ownership, which is personal financial stability and control of your time.