Taking the “Busy” out of Business With Business Coach Charles Alexander

Paul Winkler: Welcome to “The Investor Coaching Show.” I am Paul Winkler.

Two Stages of Life

We talk money, investing, financial planning, retirement planning, and just life around here sometimes. Sometimes, it’s more fun to just talk about life.

Because we have these two stages of life that we go through, one where we work for money and the second one where money works for us.

And it’s kind of the idea that you’ve got one person making the income. You kind of like this idea.

You’ve got one person making the income when it’s you. And as time goes on, you go, “Ugh, I thought I’d want to do this forever.”

And sometimes we think we want to do something a little bit longer, we probably should do something. But anyway, so we get to the point where we’re like, “I just want to do this,” and then that’s where money takes over, and you’re living off of what you saved. And you have tens of thousands of companies when I diversify really, really well, and those companies create stuff. And then I live off the income.

Now, sometimes what happens though is that we start accumulating money, and especially if you grow up in a household where frugality is the rule. And maybe somebody, a grandparent — probably a grandparent — went through the Great Depression. And they started saving and saving, saving and taking and going and stuffing using paper bags over and over and over again. Or using plastic bags over and over again and just recycling everything because you never knew when you’d be lacking.

And then you save money for retirement, you save money for retirement. You live on way less than you earn and then pack it away. And then when you get to retirement, it’s like, “I can’t pull the trigger and live off of the money because I’ve basically programmed myself to save forever, and I can’t get myself to spend any of this stuff.”

How We Spend Our Time

So I’ve got a friend of mine. Every once in a while, we’ll drag Charles Alexander on here. And hey, man, good to see you.

Charles Alexander: How are you, sir?

PW: Really, really good. And I’m really excited about this. So I get an email one day, and this email starts off, and it’s Pop-Pop. “Hey, come closer, son. The time is near.” This sounds like it’s maybe from the Old Testament, and you’ve got …

CA: You got a family gathered around.

PW: You got a family gathered around and me sad, but eager, “Yes. What is it, Pop-Pop?” “I wish. I wish I spent more time in the…”

And it’s me: “Where Pop-Pop? Where do you wish you would’ve spent more time?” “The office. I wish I had spent more time on the computer at my desk and I could check email one more, just one more time.” Then, the heart monitor flatlines. “No.” And I was like, “Oh, that is a great opening of an email.”

CA:I appreciate that. I think I stole it from “The Simpsons.”

PW: Oh, did you?

CA: I think that was a little call back to C. Montgomery Burns. And I keep making these pop culture references.

PW: I have no clue.

CA: Paul watches no TV. This dude doesn’t watch movies.

This is why he’s like a Renaissance guy. He plays the drums. He has alternate careers.

PW: Yeah, TV, radio …

CA: He reads all the books.

PW: … reading, psychology.

CA: Either way, there’s a hilarious show called “The Simpsons.” I think I stole that from “The Simpsons.”

PW: Okay, all right. They were yellow people, weren’t they?

CA: Yeah, they still are.

PW: Yeah, something like that. I knew that much. Anyway, so cartoon, they were yellow in the cartoon. I don’t know.

But so, this is intriguing to me because I have seen this so many times. And let me kind of set it up. Sometimes people have problems with other family members, their upbringing.

Maybe they had problems when they were kids, and they didn’t get along with people, or they were afraid of being rejected. They were afraid of being pushed away.

And so what they do is they gravitate toward kind of think Scrooge money, or they gravitate toward work because, “I know that money won’t reject me. I know that work won’t reject me.” Some people gravitate toward drugs.

CA: Sure.

PW: Or toward alcohol and those types of things. But quite often, what happens is they become so comfortable with those things that they never end up with good relationships because they spend all their time doing those things. So what were you thinking when you were talking about this?

CA: So, in terms of what I’m thinking, so anybody listening, I’m a full-time business coach. I have my own coaching programs outside of that, and I work with entrepreneurs to help them create time freedom.

Time freedom’s not a real term. It’s something that I think I sort of made up, but it’s the idea that a lot of the entrepreneurs out there, even if they’re just on their own freelancing, they get very used to the busyness.

Busy is a badge of honor, sadly enough, to where they’re just checking email at 9 p.m., working on the weekends.

They’re missing the kids’ events because they got the laptop open and they’re never present.

Where Do You Want To Be?

CA: So in working on creating programs for them and whatever else, this whole concept crossed my mind in terms of “Where do you want to be, not just in retirement but even now?” And nobody ever says, “I wish I would’ve just spent more time in the office.”

PW: Right.

CA: Nobody ever says, “I wish I could just check email one more time.” But that’s what we do instinctively to fill the void, to fill the little boredom that we have. We want more little dopamine hits.

So that’s what we do when we get stuck into that busy pattern. So I was making that obviously very facetious.

PW: Mm-hmm. Oh, sure.

CA: In terms of somebody that’s at their death, no one says this. They all say, “I wish…” And it even comes from a book, “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.”

“I wish I’d have spent more time with friends. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I would’ve been true to myself.”

But in doing that, the point of that email was to tell folks, “Go ahead and schedule some time off now.”

Go ahead and decide what you want to do with some free time. And then that becomes your goal. 

And then you work backwards into that instead of the other way around.

PW: Now, what I’ve found is that so often what we do is we fool ourselves into thinking we’ll have forever.

CA: Oh, yeah.

PW: “I have a lot of time. I’ll go reconnect with that friend next year or some point in the future.”

CA: Yes.

PW: “Because we’re going to have time.”

CA: “I’m busy.”

PW: “Yeah, I’m busy.” And the thing about being busy, the interesting thing about busy and business and work and money and accumulation of money is that it’s culturally acceptable. Whereas, let’s say that’s your thing that you go off and do to escape relationships is drugs or alcohol, let’s say.

CA: Sure.

PW: Well, that’s not culturally acceptable.

CA: It’s maddening. If I were to tell you that I’d sat around all day long and eating Oreos and bags of Doritos because I’m hungry.

PW: Right.

CA: “Oh, that makes sense.” That’s the equivalent of being busy, right? You’re just junk fooding all day.

PW: Yeah. Yeah. And with the whole thing of going toward money and work and those types of things, you’re successful.

CA: Right.

PW: You get a badge of honor with that. But the thing is that your soul is sucked out, is really what it gets down to.

What Is Enough?

PW: So the issue, I think, is people are saying, “Well, I’m not making enough. I’m not making enough.” What’s enough? I mean, that’s the question.

CA: That’s a great financial advisor question, but nobody ever has the number.

PW: I know. But I want to want to hear your answer.

CA: Well, so that’s where I kind of come to this, that I do this concept, or why I even sent that email. The point isn’t that I had this X number of dollars. And by the way, folks, when I’m saying this, I’m speaking to me personally.

PW: Sure.

CA: If my wife was listening to any of this, her eyes would roll so hard they’d fall out of her head, dude.

PW: Every one of us. Everyone. Yeah. When we got one finger pointing at you, we got three pointing back at us, right?

CA: So in saying all of that, it’s what’s the goal? So I help people create a little more time off.

Well, before we do that, I ask the same question you just asked me, “All right, what days are you going to work? What hours do you want to work? Better yet, when you get some time off, what do you want to do with it?” Oh my God, that’s a stumper right there.

PW: That question I like a lot.

Because a lot of times I tell people, “When you’re thinking about retirement, what are you going to retire to?”

CA: Right.

PW: So, how do people answer that when you’re asking what they want to do?

CA: Well, they pause for a minute.

PW: A minute. A lot of minutes.

CA: Well, they try to skip out. “Well, I just, you know … well, I just want to hang out. I just want some time off.”

So let’s sit down. And I’ve really gotten people to pencil this out.

And these are entrepreneurs. Busy professionals. Same thing. But they they say, I don’t know if anybody means it, they want to spend more time with family.

“I want to be able to go visit Nan-Nan and Pop-Pop or whoever, and I want to go travel more. And those friends I’ve been putting off that I wanted to go meet and have dinner with, have a drink with, whatever.” Those come up. And then it gets into a bunch of things.

“I want to sleep more. I want to go back to the gym.” Hiking is surprisingly popular. I don’t think anybody actually really wants to go hiking that bad.

But we like the idea of buying a new pair of Timberlands and one of those funny little vests. But either way, I get a ton of answers, and it kind of goes right down the line.

“I want to read, I want to paint, I want to whatever.” And people get really excited. And even some of the folks I worked with, they picked up old hobbies. They went back to playing the guitar.

PW: Oh, yeah.

CA: Or buying vinyl records, even though they knew they didn’t want to play them. They just enjoyed collecting them. But the point was, if you don’t have that in mind, you don’t have that goal in mind, you can never tell somebody, “Well, how much money do I need? Well, I need to have more money.”

“Okay. Well, if these are the things you want to do, we can almost calculate how much cash you need in order to do that, so when we get to that point, then you can go do that.”

Getting to the “Why”

CA: Unfortunately, get stuck into what you were talking about, and folks can’t break away from the busy badge of honor they’ve created.

PW: Right. And as you say that, I like typically going to the next stage on that particular question. It’s “I want to go travel. I want to go visit these people. I want to learn these things.”

I remember one lady I talked to, she wanted to go to Austria, “The Sound of Music,” it was like this whole thing. And here’s a woman in her 80s, and I’m having this conversation with her, and she wished she had done it when she was younger.

But then what I did is I said, “Okay. Well, why do you want to do that? What is it? What’s the value behind that particular goal of going to Austria?” Because obviously to me, Charles, I’m sitting there going, It’s not going to happen.

CA: Right.

PW: It’s not going to happen.

CA: Bless her.

PW: Her health was in decline, and she really couldn’t do it. And the reason was his beauty, Beauty.

The value that she held dear was God’s creation, is kind of how she put it. And I said, “Wow. Can we experience God’s creation right here in your backyard?”

And the answer was, yeah, we can. So it really wasn’t about that particular thing, but I love the idea that she had to sit down and be very intentional on coming up with what she wanted to do with her time. And that, to me, is important: coming up with what exactly I want to do.

CA: And that’s right.

I think the more granular you get, the more real it becomes, and the more you can kind of dig behind why you want to do that. 

Or are there alternate ways to do that?

Putting Off Your Goals

CA: But I was even telling you earlier, and it’s a good book, cringeworthy from a financial advisor point of view, “Die with Zero.”

PW: Right.

CA: But the point of the book is a lot of the things you’re putting off and saying, “I’ll do it later, I’ll do it later, I’ll do it later,” well, at some point, even though you have seven figures to your name, if you’ve waited until mid-70s, mid-80s, you can still do some of those things, but they become much more difficult, and your energy, your fitness level or your goals at that point change. So, if there are some of the other things you’re wanting to do before then, maybe take the time to do them now or find the alternate version of doing that now.

But don’t just stay so busy checking email one more time, scrolling one more time, looking at your phone one more time because that’ll get you off track from the thing you ultimately started doing your own entrepreneurial adventure in the first place for. It killed the purpose.

PW: A couple of things. Just one point. The reason I didn’t like that book, folks, is because there’s a lot of really bad advice.

CA: Yeah.

PW: Just as far as what they tell. The concept sounds good. But the problem that you run into is that sometimes you have unintended consequences —

CA: Sure.

PW: — when you go and give your property to your kids, being one thing. But there are a lot of other things, as far as when you spend your assets down, and all of a sudden inflation, the dollar value decreases. It can be a real problem. But let me just hit on something that you made a point on that I thought was really good just there.

We often don’t think about the fact that the laws of thermodynamics apply to us, that we will get to a point where we don’t have the ability to make the travel. 

We won’t be able to go the places we want to go. We won’t have the energy. If I want to go, let’s say, over to Europe —

CA: Sure.

PW: — and I want to walk around the streets in Italy or something like that, I’m just going to be like, “I’m too tired to walk anywhere. I really don’t want to.” And just recognize that that happens.

And often what I’ll do is I’ll say, “Hey, look at your parents, look at your grandparents, and look at their level of activity that they’re engaging in. And what do they talk about? Well they talk about how they’re going to need to take an afternoon nap.”

CA: Sure.

PW: And just recognize that you’re probably not going to escape being that person yourself, number one.

We’re All Busy

PW: But what is the reason that we put it off, put it off, put it off?

Why do we put it off into the future and say, “I can’t do it right now. I don’t have time to do it right now.” What goes through people’s minds that they put it off?

CA: Because, well, for a wide variety of reasons. And one thing is, technically, if we wanted to justify, we are, quote, unquote, too busy.

And this is another thing you and I have talked about before.

Every time we say yes to one thing, we’re saying no to a couple of other things, and we don’t say no to a whole lot of things that come down.

So for me and my wife, I won’t tell her age, but I’m 49. I got kids at home, 16, 13, 12. Brother, we got something going on every single day. Every day this week, got work, got to hit the gym somewhere in point.

Then every evening we have somewhere to be. Now, granted, I do enjoy that. But it’s easy for me to justify saying, “I don’t have time right now.”

Because if we’re prioritizing those things, because I’ve said yes to so many things, that keeps us from doing the things that we wanted to do. Not to mention, when I arrived today, saw Paul, saw Dana, saw Andrew, “Hey, man, what have been up to?”

Even though I’m the guy saying this, you remember what I said? “Well, I’ve just been so …” what?

PW: Mm-hmm. Busy.

CA: “I’ve been so busy.”

PW: Yeah. Yeah.

CA: It’s the thing that just bumbles out of our mouths that we’re all so proud of. “I’ve been busy too.” We’re all busy. Yay.

PW: Yeah. Well, we always hear people say “fear of missing out.”

CA: Yeah.

PW: What is the fear that we have? I think of living life with urgency.

CA: Sure.

PW: And that I don’t want to miss anything. So I say yes to everything, but I love that you say that you’re saying no to other things.

Making Trade-Offs for Time

CA: So the key is, even though I’ve heard people talk about Einstein and “time is a relative concept.” Whatever, dude. There are 24 hours in a day.

PW: Yeah, right?

CA: So today, Paul asked me to come hang out here. I did my own annual financial review. We’re doing this interview right now. That means I am not doing something else, and there’s no weight, shape, form, or fashion around it.

Now, luckily, I’m pretty good with my time and had this space for it. Most people don’t have the margin for it. So if they do this business-wise, maybe you’re not going to go prospecting today now, and that’s going to have a ramification later.

Or I’m not going to create a proposal that I was supposed to, so that’ll be an issue later. I’m not going to bill right now. So whatever the case is.

For most people, they don’t skip the entrepreneurial stuff because they have such a fear mentality built up. 

So that means “Now I’m not going to go to the gym. Now I’m not going to go to my kids’ basketball game tonight because I’m going to be so busy” or whatever it is.

“I’m not going to go on a date. I’m not going to cook dinner. I’ll just grab something to go.” It all has a trickle-down effect.

So you have to make decisions based on the idea if you take on something, something else at this point in your life has to be subtracted, and it’s not a bad thing. Maybe I could say, “Well, I’ll doom scroll one hour less.” That’s fantastic.

“I’ll watch one hour less of the news.” And I know I’m on news radio.

PW: Right.

CA: “But look, I’ll turn the news off for an hour.”

PW: Right. Sure.

CA: Whatever it is. That’s good. That’s a good trade-off. But we don’t normally make those trades.

PW: Well, a lot of times, the news just, quite frankly, makes us anxious.

CA: It does.

PW: And we may be walking away from anxiety just by doing that.

CA: Yeah, and this is off-topic, but there’s a ton of news all the time. Unless you plan on personally making changes in your life or somebody else’s, you ingesting all of that news all the time about what’s going on here, the Middle East, or the White House, if you’re not going to do something about it, you being glued to the TV, radio, or podcast is not helping.

PW: I heard somebody say one time that we used to live with our lives in 15 square miles, and that was literally all we knew.

CA: Sure.

PW: It was going on within 15 square miles, and we had no clue what was going on 100 miles away from us. And now, we know what’s going on all over the world, and that is doing nothing but stressing us out and causing us to live life at a scarcity level.

CA: Right.

PW: It’s where it really gets down to. What I want to do after this, I want to talk a little bit about how you prioritize because it sounds like that’s what you’re talking about.

CA: It is.

How Do You Prioritize?

PW: I have to come up with a priority list on what’s really important because I can make number one, the most important thing, making money, making money, making money, being more productive, or I could decide that that’s not a priority, that there are other things that are more important, and how do we make a hierarchy as to what is most important going down? Because that, I think, is really where the rubber meets the road on this.

You’re listening to “The Investor Coaching Show.” I’m Paul Winkler, along with Charles Alexander, a friend of mine and coach.

He actually coaches a lot of people on doing these steps, and he has a program that he brings people through too. I’m going to have you talk about that a little bit too because, I think that is intriguing. I think it’s a deal of this century, quite frankly. I know that’s not what you’re here for.

CA: Sure.

PW: But I think that is something that people need to know about. We usually talk all about money and investing, and financial planning, but sometimes we have to talk about not necessarily getting yourself so busy that you don’t enjoy anything that you accumulate or any of your free time or working so hard that all of a sudden you get to the end of life and you’re going, “Wait a minute.”

Erickson actually put it this way. You have integrity versus despair is the eighth stage of life, as he called it. It’s like, “Did I do everything I was supposed to do or is there despair? I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, and maybe I missed a lot of life in this accumulation or working so much that I couldn’t miss an email.”

So talk a little bit about how do you prioritize? It’s like the “I” is never satisfied. There’ll never be enough.

You’ll get to whatever goal you’ve got and then you’ll get there and you’ll go, “Oh, well, it wasn’t as great as I thought it was going to be. I think I need a little bit more and then I’ll be happy.”

Or as I think it was Rockefeller, he says, “Mr. Rockefeller, you’re like the richest man in the entire world. How much more do you need?”

And he said, “Just a little bit more,” and then his accountant was asked, when he died, supposedly he was asked, “Well, how much did he leave?” All of it.

CA: Right.

PW: I was like, whoops. What an eye-opening line.

CA: Yeah.

PW: So how do you prioritize?

CA: Anytime, if you think about this, Google it or talk to somebody, everybody’s got a 28-step process, but realistically, the first thing you have to realize is that you can really only have a handful of priorities, two or three, four or five tops.

If you have 28 priorities, you don’t have priorities. You just have a to-do list. 

I’m speaking about this. We can get into personal stuff, but realistically, if you’re an entrepreneur or a busy professional, a nonprofit leader, you’re getting pulled into whatever, a dozen different directions at any point in the day. Every single day.

You’ve got meetings, you have projects, you have slide decks and proposals, and you’re in Slack and you’re whatever, and all of them are on fire, which gets us all excited. We got all these different things to do.

PW: You’re needed.

CA: Yeah.

PW: And we like to be needed.

CA: I’m important when I’m needed, right?

PW: Right. For sure.

What Is Time Blocking?

CA: So when I’m working with an entrepreneur, I really go back to what you and I discussed a minute ago. You say, “What is the goal? What do you want?”

“Well, not necessarily the dollar amount, but we’ll get to that. What do you want to do with your life? How much time do you want to work? I know you want to impact all these people, and you got these big hair y’all days just go with, seriously, how much time do you want off?”

“What do you want to do with it? Great. We can work our way backward into how much money you need to do that. Great.”

“Well, let’s figure out how to get you to that point. That money that you need to make to let you do the things you want to do. Then we can quantify what makes you that money.”

And most folks can tell you three or four things usually. So at that point, instead of me trying to just time block, and I think time blocking, big fan of it — a lot of folks have it backward. I had it backward for years.

PW: What is time blocking?

CA: Time blocking, as I look at it, most people at this point are living and dying by a calendar. I’ve got my Google Calendar, a time block from nine to 12. I’m going to prospect, and from one to two, I’m going to check in.

Whatever it is, we block off that time. But most of us never follow suit with what’s on the calendar because as soon as we do, something catches fire and we think we have to go put it out right away.

I tell people instead of time blocking and then trying to do everything with that, instead, for a week, maybe two, let’s see what you’re currently doing. 

This would be just the same as if I’m trying to do a financial budget. I can create a budget and suddenly go tell the wife and the kids, “This is how much money we’re now going to spend on gasoline and groceries and on insurance.” But if it doesn’t match up to what I’m currently doing, in reality, it could be a complete disaster.

And then we’ll get off track immediately and say, “Well, budgeting doesn’t work. Daddy said, we’re only spending 600 on groceries, and we went through that in a week and a half.”

PW: Do people actually sit down and track their time like that? It seems like such a hassle.

CA: Well, yes, but not for an eternity. So that’s what I tell them. It’s like same when you’re doing a financial budget.

Realistically speaking, I don’t know a lot of people outside of the Dave Ramsey disciples, and I have been one, but folks aren’t necessarily doing that every dollar to every penny to every day. They set it, they create the habits that fall into it.

PW: Well, I was talking about time blocking, as you’re following your time is what I was saying. So they do that?

CA: They do it for a week or two. That’s why I say it’s important to do for a week or two.

PW: But you can get people to do it?

CA: I can get them to do it for a week or two.

How To Time Block

PW: How do they do it?

CA: There’s a dozen different ways to do it. I do it really old school. I mean, there’s apps or tools you can use, Clockify or Toggle.

But realistically, if you are serious about this, and if anybody wants, I’ve got a spreadsheet, and that’s exactly what we do. Like Paul, “Hey, man, this is going to be tough, but once you do this, that’s going to make everything else fall into place.”

This is a keystone habit. If you’ll just track what you’re doing in 15-minute increments today, tomorrow, the day after, and yes, you’ll forget at some point, and yes, you’ll have to backfill, but when we get done, we can actually go back and do something with the data that we have.

How many times were you checking email? How many meetings did you go to? How long did you spend researching this topic that really has nothing to do with your job today or your business today?

PW: There’s a lot.

CA: So look, I’ve had a handful of my clients I go through with them and have done this, and it is a massive eye-opener. Several folks figured out, grown men and women, that “Well, there’s an extra two hours I spent every day on TikTok.”

PW: Yeah, I’ll bet a lot of people spend a lot of time.

CA: But look, man, “I’m serving way too much time on this committee or that board,” or “I’m having too many meetings with clients that I don’t even really want to have.” But we just have always done it that way.

So once you quantify, you can kind of go back and look and say, “All right, well let me go through this list. Let me sort the list.” Okay, well, all right, this is a priority, prospecting, the referral follow-up, the content, whatever it is.

Once you go through each of those and you figure out what the priorities are, then we can kind of reverse delegate. 

We can time block outside of that now that we’ve created this list of priorities that we’re excited about, that helps us hit our goals.

Spending Time on What Matters

PW: So it sounds like that is something that is so worthwhile. You better just buckle down and do it.

CA: Look, dude, I’ve had so many people tell me, “Well, I’m pretty good at this. I think I’ll just estimate.”

And then I ask them, it’s like, “Well, how often has that worked?” And well, I use you as an example. How often does that work when you do it for your budget, when you’ve actually tracked it versus what you thought?

You’re like, “Holy hell, Chick-fil-A is getting half of my paycheck. Dude, Amazon’s getting the rest.” You didn’t know that until you did it.

Or when you’re doing that for food, “I don’t understand why I can’t lose weight.” Well, the extra handful of Goldfish you shoved down your throat while you were packing your kids’ lunch or the extra glass of wine, it added up.

I can promise you, you know way more about your food and your money than you do your time. The time is the most elusive thing we have.

PW: Probably true. So on the other side of this break, let’s talk a little bit more about prioritizing these things.

CA: We will.

PW: I think that there’s a way I do it. I’m going to share my way of thinking about it, but it’s going to be so basic that I want you to build on it.

CA: No worries.

PW: You’re listening to “The Investor Coach Show.” I’m Paul Winkler, and Charles Alexander is here talking about just getting people to the point where they’re going, “You know what, I’m spending my time on the things that really matter, rather than spending my time spinning my wheels, trying to build some kind of a net worth that some other person’s going to actually spend.” It’s really what it gets down to.

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