one of the things that I teach in training, it's a drill that I do with people where you essentially put you split a piece of paper into four quadrants, and I have four quadrants that you fill in on. What does life balance look like for you? And on that paper, one of the things that is not on this paper is work. So this is, if you didn't have to work, what does life balance look like for you? And we split it into four quadrants. And so we work through that exercise together. So every week I'm looking at my quadrants and I'm going, okay, what am I gonna do this week? Am I getting something from my personal? It was something that fulfills me. How about my relationships? Is there a date night with my significant other on the calendar? But guess what? If you're thinking that there's just magically gonna be some time for a date, and you just keep thinking that's gonna happen. It will never come. So you have to put that on the calendar first.
Brian Glass:hey guys. Welcome back to Time Freedom for Lawyers. I'm your host Brian Glass, and today I have another Brian with me, Brian Nelson Palmer. Brian is the founder of Productivity Gladiator and he's a TEDx speaker. Brian,
Brian Nelson-Palmer:welcome to the show. My. Brian, thanks so much for having me on, man. And I appreciate, it's gonna be real easy to remember your name because I like your style. You even spell it with an I, which man? I really like that for all the Y's out there. I dunno if you've ever heard this, but I somebody jokingly told me this and I've always remembered it, which is, man, if you spell it with a Y, you're a Ryan wannabe. And it was like, Ooh, ooh, that's a good quip. I like that.
Brian Glass:I've always just thought you were wrong. Oh,
Brian Nelson-Palmer:fair. I guess this depends if you're trying to be their friend or not. I don't know.
Brian Glass:So Brian let's dive in. Tell me about productivity gladiator. What is it
Brian Nelson-Palmer:that you do? Sure. Productivity Gladiator is a system for handling the overwhelm in life. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of stuff coming at you all day, every day. With between the stuff you've gotta remember, things you have to do, places you need to be, and how do you handle all of that stuff. But productivity gladiator isn't just. Being able, being productive. It's not about getting more widgets in one day. It's not about handling a hundred emails instead of 80 of them. It's about when you have that system, does that allow you to live the life that you wanna live right now? And I talked a little bit about that in my TEDx talk. I certainly hope folks will watch that because if you want to get an idea of kind of me and what I'm about, that's a great preview for you. But for you to know right now, it's really just. How do you live the life you wanna live right now? Not wait until retirement to do that. And so I've got a system for that handling all that overwhelm so you can do the stuff you wanna do. Now it's like you
Brian Glass:listen to the show, cuz that's exactly what we talk about here, is we talk to high income earning professionals. About how do we prioritize our tasks? How do we hire the right staff? How do we train our people correctly so that we can focus on high dollar value, high leverage items, and we can have this staff be all the doers and the gophers, and we can design lives that are great for us. So tell me about your journey to the founder of your.
Brian Nelson-Palmer:Sure. For me it started many years ago. Here's what was happening at the time when I started Productivity Gladiator, I was the drummer in a rock band. I was. The syndicated FM radio show and a podcast host. I was on a softball team. I was, I had a day job, by the way. I also was a group fitness instructor, so four to five times a week I was teaching group fitness classes, and then I was also taking trips to Europe and living it up and making these crazy trips and stuff. And one of the questions or the things that people knew me asked often is, okay, how do you handle it all? How do you stay on top of all of. And for me it was really a soul searching moment about, okay, how do I handle it all? And I've always been a student of, I'm a Lean Six Sigma, got a belt in that, and I've done all of the process improvement stuff. And I used to teach. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I've been an instructor for that. So for me, I've been obsessed about personal development. And so I what I realized is I have this system and my challenge to me was, can I teach it to people? And so that's where Productivity Gladiator was born, and so you can see it productivity gladiator.com. I recently, I did the TEDx talk, which was, got a bunch of views and was, I was so moved and it warmed my heart that. People were so interested in this idea, and by the way, for you, the spoiler alert it, if you watch the TEDx talk, I teach you a way to calculate what your personal time outside of work is worth, and how does that change your life. How can that help you make decisions about your time? Because time management is a thing that everybody faces. So it really was just that journey of having this, all right, I got this great life that I love and I'm living it right now, and can I share that with people? And so that's where Productivity Gladiator was born.
Brian Glass:I wanna start with, this, the dollar productive or dollar per hour cost of your time outside of the office. So lawyers, especially hourly, billable lawyers, know to the six minute increments what their time is worth when they're being productive in the office. But you have a formula, Brian, for how to calculate what your time is like during that time when you're outside of the office, when you're not asleep, when you're not eating, when you're. When you're not doing the things you need to do, just to be a living, breathing, functioning human and then rounding out to, okay, what is that time worth in in hard dollar increments. So why don't you talk about how we get
Brian Nelson-Palmer:there. Sure. For you listening right now, if you wanna find out your number right now, you can go to productivity gladiator.com, and on the very first page, you can scroll down to, it's one scroll down. There are the calculators, and there is a time value calculator button right there. So if you hit that button, It takes you to a page and you can plug in the numbers you need to find out yours. So you'll find out that calculator will tell you what your personal time is worth, what your work time is worth realistically, and then what you, how many personal time hours you might have in a week. And so where that's really helpful is if you have decisions like, should I hire a house cleaner? If you know that your Saturday afternoon is.$50 an hour and you could hire someone for$20 an hour to do that, then that might be worth. And on the flip side though, there, there's not, just because you have a number, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that everything in life is a formula and a math problem. God, wouldn't it be great if that was the case? That is not the world we live in. But what is helpful is if you have this number as a baseline or a frame of reference. It helps you make better decisions with your time. And the goal is to live like you're worth the value of your time. And that's my sort of tagline is I want you to live like you're worth the value of your time. So if you do it that way, you'll make better decisions with your time. What I love about
Brian Glass:that because, the question that I had for you as we're coming into this talk is, and what do I do with that information, right? Because it seems to me that if I hire a lawn mowing company to come by at$50 an hour and my hourly rate is a hundred dollars an hour, right? I'm saving, or I'm not spending the$50 delta between their cost and my hourly time. But if I then go and sit on the couch and scroll social media okay, my time is worth more, but I haven't gained any value. And so I thought, as I was looking through your website and I was listening to your TED Talk about what is the real savings for those hours where I'm not doing something productive with the money that I've spent. But I think what you just said about. About living as though your life is worth That amount of money tells me that I've gotta go out and do more things that are bringing me more value in the time that I've hired out some of the help.
Brian Nelson-Palmer:Does that resonate? Absolutely. I wanna, I want a yes and with you there. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And I wanna share two things you shouldn't do and then a few things that you should do. So here's the mistakes that people make after they have this conversation with me or they find out their number. Some people, oh my gosh, I was talking with a guy who was a Wall Street guy, and this guy makes buku dollars and his hourly rate was a really high number. And when he did the calculation, his interpretation was gosh, if I sleep six hours, I sleep too much. I should cut that down to five hours and then try to get a little more time and trade more socks and oh my God, please, no, that's a mistake. Don't do that. That's not, no, it's a, you need sleep. You need to take care of your body and your life. So that's not it. And the other mistake is trying to think that, trying to. Decrease. I'm sorry I'm stumbling over my words because I'm thinking about what you just said about social media and what I want to communicate is you nailed it, which is the mistake is not to. Skip cleaning the house or doing the yard and pay someone to do it so that you can scroll social media. Because there, there's actually research that shows that you get more more fulfillment by direct communication with your friends and people that know you, and you do not get that fulfillment on social media. So if you want, like social media would be a bad example of what you could do instead of mowing the yard. But on the flip side, One of the things that, here's what I hope you do with that information, I was reading, a study by a woman who worked with patients in hospice, right? So these are people that, this is their last moment, their last day, and what are, what was their advice to people looking back? And what's interesting is this comes from young people in hospice, old people in hospice, gamers in hospice, all the different people. The message was the same, and the things that they talked about were be a better parent, spouse, or child. Take more risks in your life go experience more, make those memories, things that are fulfilling for your soul, do that instead. So in my workshops and when I work with, I, businesses bring me in to teach productivity, gladiator teach these concepts to their people. And one of the things that we talk about a lot is, okay, so if you're not gonna do the yard, what do you do instead? There's a couple of. If you're doing the yard and you're teaching your son how to do the yard, then you can't put a price on that. So it doesn't matter if you could spend 50 bucks to get somebody else to do it. If you and your son are gonna do that together, and that's your father-son thing, or your mother-daughter time, do that. Be there for your family and your friends and make memories that last a lifetime. That's the stuff that I hope you do instead. But if the di, if the choices between getting to do that versus you've gotta go mow the yard, totally worth it to outsource that. And especially if your time is worth more than that. Like here's an example for you that I just encountered the other day. I am, I'm a boat. So I have a boat and one of the things that I just found out is I'm, this year, for the first time, I'm gonna keep the boat in a marina, like in the water parked at a dock. One of the things I didn't know, cuz I'm relatively new to boating. I've been doing this for four or five years, but I never had it stay in the water. If you keep it in the water, you know what you have to do? You have to paint the bottom. It's called bottom paint. You have to bottom paint the boat. And some of, if you're listening right now and you're a boat person, you're like, you stupid. You should have known you're moron. Yeah. But for. I was still, nobody had, I didn't have anybody to teach me this stuff, so I was like, I'm gonna be a boat guy. I love going out on the water. And so now I'm keeping it in the water. I'm gonna have to bottom paint the boat. The quote, I got to bottom paint the boat was$2,500. Okay. And Okay, that's not chunk change. So now it kicks into what is my time worth and is it worth it to pay somebody to do that for me, or could I do it myself? And that's the debate that's in my head right now. To bottom paint my own boat. It's gonna take me probably two weekends. That's not, it's a huge piece. That's gonna be a complicated thing. There's gonna be a lot of learning. I've never done it before, so I'm leaning a little bit more toward outsourcing. But that's also because there's no fulfillment. If that's gonna be a project I could do with my family and that's gonna be making memories that'll last a lifetime, that summer that we painted the bottom of the boat together, that might be a little, it might sway me a little more, but right now at that's a lot of money. My time isn't worth quite that much. So I would actually, I'm leaning toward painting it myself. So that's just a funny example that just happened to me last week that I was doing this very thing. Perfect example,
Brian Glass:because for me it not only would be the time spent painting the boat, it would be the nights. In the weeks to come where I worried about did I paint the boat correctly and did I use the right kind of paint and did I put enough coats on it. And so the analogy that you use about, the time value of your money is exactly the same one that I use in a lot of sales calls with new clients, with relatively small cases. So I'm an auto accident lawyer, and when somebody's calling me, they're paying me a portion of the settlement value of their case. And a lot of times it's, for us, not a very large case for them. It may be a large case and it may be fairly easy for them to figure out, but thankfully in Northern Virginia, everybody's busy. Everybody has high dollar paying jobs. Everybody's kids are in eight different sports that they're shuttling around to. And so my sales pitch many times is, listen, I'm probably not gonna put too many more dollars in your pocket at the end of this case after my fee. But I am gonna save you 25 hours of research in Virginia law. I'm gonna save you all of the time in the aggravation of wondering, did I do this correctly? And I'm gonna save you, the stress of maybe you're gonna get a bill three weeks after you settle your case that you didn't account for. So having it done right and having it done right the first time is often worth many multiples of what your daily time rate is worth.
Brian Nelson-Palmer:Can I just, while you're saying that, what I wanted to share that's huge is I, so I've had this conversation with a lot of attorneys and one of the things that I want to just, yes. And you right now on that is when you're working with that client, you can actually take them to my website. You can use my calculator, you can find out what their time is worth, and then you can put a number on it for them on. 25 hour, if it's 25 bucks an hour or whatever, that gives them a frame of reference for, okay, it's gonna take, we might have to go to court. That's gonna be 10 hours of your time and I know that's your weekend and whatever. It's this much of your time. Here's a calculator that's worth, call it this much money and, but we're gonna make this much money. So it looks like it might be worth it or maybe not, but it's just a way to put a number on that and that helps people make that decision sometimes when they can look at one number and another number and. Oh, okay. That looks worth it.
Brian Glass:That's a tremendous value add. The issue there is that it would work with engineers and accountants, and I hate having engineers and accountants as clients. Exactly. That reason. Everything comes down to math. And I went to law school cause I'm not any good at math.
Brian Nelson-Palmer:That is a good point. I, you're right, it's not a bulletproof approach, but for those people that are waffling on, I'm not sure it's gonna be worth my time. Yeah. That's an interesting perspective.
Brian Glass:I think that's beautiful though. One of the things that you talk about in, in your talk that is I think the archetype that everybody has of either their parents or their grandparents is like hopping in a car, going to buy gas, but going to the farthest away gas station and not computing, the number of minutes or hours to get to that farther away gas station to save 33 cents a gallon or whatever. I'm wondering if you think that's generational because I don't know. I have too many of my friends who are contemporaries now who would do something like that. I feel like my generation now is willing to overpay for convenience. And so being in this world, is that something that you see as a generational shift or am I just playing in a different kind of cohort?
Brian Nelson-Palmer:I've got a yes and a no answer to that one. I say yes, because the generation before ours was born from the generation that went through the Depression. And so they learned from their parents that the value of the dollar is Penn ultimate. Absolutely. And that's right. You're saying this for you listening, I had a dad who drove. All my whole life, every Saturday he would get up and he'd say, I'm going to get gas, and he'd be gone for 45 minutes on a quick day. Because he went all the way to the neighboring town to save 10 cents a gallon on gas. Now that was all the way up into my late twenties. That was my attitude. I drove all the way to the neighboring town because that's what my dad did, and that's who I learned it from. And it wasn't until I started talking about the value of my time and this whole conversation we're having right now, that I started to realize, holy smokes, if I'm putting 15 gallons of gas in my little Hyundai or whatever it is, I'm driving and. That 15 gallon, or call it 20 gallons to make the math easy, 20 gallons of gas, 10 cents a gallon that I'm saving, that's$2. But if it takes me 45 minutes to make that drive, sure, and my time is worth 35 bucks an hour then. This is a no-brainer that my God, my$35 hour is worth more than my$2 in savings. So now I always go to the closest gas station. I never even overthink it. I, you could even do the math down to the, if one, one really valuable thing, by the way, is I in my calculator, I hope you, if you haven't already, I hope you go to predictivity gladiator.com and try the calculator for yourself cuz this number is really helpful that we, in this conversation Brian and I are having right now. But, If you know what an hour is worth, divide that number by 12 and also keep in mind what five minutes is worth for you, because that's the game changer for me as if that's one example that I have is five minutes is two and a half dollars for me in the way that I calculate mine, just my personal time. And so you. The cost to turn around, to go to the other side of the road to get gas from the other side of the road because it's 2 cents cheaper, is not worth the amount of time that it would take me to U-turn, go across, cut across traffic again, and do that again. That 20 cents my time is worth more than that. So a lot of time for a lot of people, this concept is about permission to. The decision that's living like your work, the value of your time, it's permission and it's easier to see it this way, which is fascinating. And then having
Brian Glass:this framework in your head, how do you prevent yourself from going all Rain Man, with the numbers and the calculation and the cost savings all
Brian Nelson-Palmer:the time. There's, that is a T-ball for the point that I was hoping that I was gonna share after I just said that. And so we didn't plan this ahead, Brian, but that was like, that was an amazing, that was like a lob pitch. Here, let me, yes. These are the things that I want you to remember. Yeah. There are three things that I want you to remember. Once you have this number right, the first thing is remember to adjust. You want to keep your value of your personal time comfortably high. So here's what that means in practicality, right? If I'm gonna, let's say I'm gonna, I value my time at 25 bucks an hour, and I'm gonna hire a house cleaner. And so it would take me four hours to clean. That's a hundred bucks. I can get the cleaner to do it for 90. That's worth my time. I don't like cleaning the house. That's cool. But if I can't afford$25 an hour, and this is the example that I really wanted to sh remember to share, Brian, so I'm glad you that you said this I was working with an attorney who was leveraged to the hilt. He had a million dollar home. He was a second year. He had a million dollar home. He was driving a really high end B M W. He had lots of student loans and so he could not afford. A$10 an hour decision with his time because all of his money was going to pay off debt and so he didn't have the income. So even though his calculation making several hundred thousand dollars a year, the calculation of his time on my calculator was really high. He didn't have a lot of personal time. He worked a lot and he had all this debt, but. He couldn't make a decision with that number because he couldn't afford it cuz he was in debt. So I share that because I want you to adjust your number. If the number you get for your personal time is too expensive or too high, adjust that number down if you need to. So for him, he went from$120 an hour down to$20 an hour because he had too much debt and that's all he could afford to make decisions with a number. So keep your number comfortably high. That's tip number one. Tip number two. Is only use one number. I had one attorney after I was working, I did a workshop with this group and this guy came up and he said, I just did a calculation and I realized that my Saturdays are worth this, but my Tuesday nights are worth this and my sure. And. Just, it's one number. So whatever your personal time number is, that's the only one I want you to remember. Don't be an overachiever and make your life more complicated with, a number for Tuesday and a number for Saturday and Sunday mornings are worth this much. And just keep it one number for your personal time and one number for your work time. That's an easy way to do it. So that's tip number two, one number and tip number three, the last. That's really important is keep it simple when you're doing this math. Like we just use the example of, making the U-turn, going to the further gas station, all we're talking about is the amount of money you saved in gas versus how much your time is worth. And every, if you're an environmental lawyer, you're going what about the environmental impact? And what about the gas that you burn to do that? And what all that stuff. And man I hear you on that stuff and if that's important for you to be, feel good about the decision you're making with your time, then totally include it. But my advice. Keep it as simple as possible to be comfortable with the decision you're making. That's important. So for me it's just the amount of time and the savings on gas. That's all I need to be comfortable with that decision.
Brian Glass:So Brian, the other thing that comes to mind is, we're having this conversation is Bill Perkins is Book Die With Zero. So flipping traditional finance. We need to save all of our money so that we have a big pot of money so that we can leave to. Our kids and our grandkids and Bill's Bill's thesis is that's a mistake because the most people, when they inherit money, they're 55 and they're already past the prime. When you, we could have used that money in its most productive way to create the greatest number of memories and bill's side idea is that you have a money bank and you have a a memory bank, and both of them pay you dividends. As you're going along in your life. And so if you can spend a little bit more money in the early years on some good memories that'll pay, dividends in his word, then you'll be better off. And so but that, if you were trying to formulate that into your. Your calculus as well, and then you got the Tuesday night number and the Saturday night number, and the Tuesday during the day, like that could get really complicated. And so I like what you're saying about keeping it simple and really just using that framework of okay, this this 17 question survey that I have to fill out in order to get a$3 off coupon is probably not worth my time.
Brian Nelson-Palmer:Totally. Absolutely. And I can't, I love that message. And what's funny is you hear us talk about it in this way and you hear that book about going to zero, and he's talking about what we're driving at is a very similar thing, which is live your life now. Don't save it for the end or save for later. And I wholeheartedly agree with that because I, I haven't shared this with you yet, but I am a type one insulin dependent diabetic. When I was four years old, I was diagnosed, and so that's been my story for as long as I can remember. But the one thing that I vividly remember is sitting in the, in Dr. Kinsella Kin's Bland, 1980s stuffy office in that white chair holding my mom's hand and finding out, Diabetics while they can live a full and mostly normal life. The life expectancy for diabetics is 10 to 20 years less. So for me, it's live every day because I have this under this story in my head that my life is gonna be shorter than everyone else's. And so where that's been a really help, big help for me is that I'm not looking at this huge, long retirement with 30 years or something. I'm looking at it going, all right, if I'm 10 to 20 years less and the average age is 77, For a guy, then that means I'm 57 to 67, which means all that retirement age stuff and they're gonna raise the retirement age and blah, blah blah is not relevant to me because I dunno if I'm gonna make it there. And now that's really morbid and diabetic treatment has come a long way. So I don't want you to think that my God, I just heard this guy on this podcast talk about dying 20 years early and that, that's not it, but having the ability to, Live now and prioritize Now I wholeheartedly agree with that because all of the research and like I shared what the hospice patients say earlier what people say at the end is that the fulfilling stuff and like you said, the life bank that you alluded to, that is what. As you look back on your life at the end, that's the stuff that you're gonna remember and the money you've got sitting in a bank account. I can't tell you how many times the founders of really successful businesses have had children and wanted to pass it onto their children. And you know what? The children didn't want, they didn't want the company. That their parents started the lover mat. Yeah. So they spent all these years thinking they were gonna pass on this legacy to their kids, and their kids didn't want it. And so it's gosh, what if you would've just spent more time with your children when they were younger instead of trying to build this thing? So prioritizing your life and not forgetting about in your life is so important. And so when I say live, like you're worth the value of your time. Part of that message is really in line with what you just said about making those decisions now that make life better for you now, and make those memories now. I lo I love that, Brian. That's really cool. And
Brian Glass:here's an exercise that I like that is a little bit morbid but really brings into stark contrast, like how much time you have left, which is take a piece of paper and draw eight, put eight columns in the paper and go across with 10 rows. You have 80 squares. 80 is the average human lifespan. And then put an exit. Every box that you are have made it past that year, and then look at how much of your life has already been crossed out and how much you have left to live. And recognize that in the last 10 or 15 years of your life, you're not going to be able to do many of the things that you can do. This year or next year. And then, so compressing, the things that we would call bucket list items that we're saving up for into the next couple of years and not into the last couple of years, really puts into contrast like, no, not only what is your time worth, but what is your time worth today? So I think that's a really powerful tool for thinking about, okay, can I pay somebody to mow the grass or can I bring in somebody to handle tasks around my office so that I can really focus on the high leverage dollar things, yes, but also the high leverage life.
Brian Nelson-Palmer:Totally. I played on an attorney. I live in the Washington, DC area for part of the year, and I was on a softball team and we played right on the National Mall under the Washington Monument, and that was one of those memories that I, yeah, covid shut it down, unfortunately. But that was one of those memories that I will treasure always, is sitting around with the cooler. Drinking a non-alcoholic beverage cuz the park service doesn't let you drink. So obviously I won't admit anything but Uhhuh, I'll say that we were drinking a, a non-alcoholic beverage but sitting under the monument with the lights and like that life experience. And I had a bunch of attorneys that played with me on that softball team and to their credit, they got outta work early. And when I say early, that's five 30. So some people might, you might be saying no that's not early. But for some not early attorneys, that is very early. They would get outta work at five 30 and make it down to the mall so that they could play softball every Thursday for the whole summer season. And that decision is what we're driving at, which is, gosh, if you got somebody to watch the kids so that you can play softball, so you can have those memories. Looking back, is it worth it? And in, in some circumstance, if you're making some of those decisions that are worth it, oh, it's so fulfilling. So it's important to rem, remember.
Brian Glass:Yeah. And let me and we'll get into your business and your offer here in a second. But I'm just curious, as somebody who does a lot of stuff drummer in a rock band podcast host softball, amateur how do you make decisions in light of your framework about what it is that you're going to do with your time?
Brian Nelson-Palmer:Sure. I, one of the things that I teach in training, we call it the productivity gladiator life quadrants, and it's a drill that I do with people where you essentially put you split a piece of paper into four quadrants, and I have four quadrants that you fill in on. What does life balance look like for you? And on that paper, one of the things that is not on this paper that we do is work. Nothing with Work is on this paper. So this is, if you didn't have to work, what does life balance look like for you? And we split it into four quadrants. And I've done a lot of research on what should go into these quadrants. And so we work through that exercise together. As with the. And so I very much practice what I preach, like what I teach with productivity. Gladiator comes from actually doing, living, working with people, lean Six Sigma, all of these, the, it's developed from practice, not from academic research, right? So this is a lot of school of hard knocks, lessons learned, but those quadrants, Are what Help guide, right? So every week I'm looking at my quadrants and I'm going, okay, what am I gonna do this week? Am I getting something from my personal? It was something that fulfills me. Do I? How about my relationships? Is there a date night with my significant other on the calendar? And so you're planning your week in advance and you're filling up your life quadrants as well as you're planning your work week in advance. So you gotta get everything done. But guess what? If you're thinking that there's just magically gonna be some time for a date, Sometime and you just keep thinking that's gonna happen. It will never come. So you have to put that on the calendar first. So planning your week in advance is something we talk about. And the life quadrants exercise is really helpful because it makes you look at your life without work and what's fulfilling then. And so that's how I do it. Is I have the quadrants and I do, I still have I've got my productivity. Gladiator is my passion career. I do still have a day job. And so I fill in the quadrants based on that, and I fill in these life balance things to make sure that I get what I want. So I, I think that's what came to mind when you asked that.
Brian Glass:That, that really sounds to me like like Jesse Itzler his, like his calendar club, right? Chunk in all of the things. In your life that you wanna experience for the next year, and then let's fit work around that and really we're trending Brian in 2023 towards being able to. For the most part, for, from wherever you want to and in whatever hours you want to work in, as long as your employer supports that, and if your employer doesn't support it, we're trending towards, it's not that hard to go and start your own business and provide value in the world and get paid for it and do it from wherever. I talked yesterday with a guy who's running a SEO surgeon engine marketing firm. Who told me that he just got tired of living in Boston and Baltimore, and so he is spending the next year, living all over the world. We had a call. He was in Spain when we were having our call. And so we've graduated to this global community where and inter internet integrated community where if you have value that people will trade for dollars. You can start up your own thing. With relative ease, at least compared to 15 years ago, and do it from wherever you want to. And having spent some time thinking about designing your own life and what it is that you want, your future and your hours and your weeks to look like, I think is really important. And I love that exercise about the four things and I love that it's a work-life balance chart without any work.
Brian Nelson-Palmer:Absolutely inevitably work life balance. When people come to me and they want to talk about work-life balance, it's not because they like too, it's too much. It's never life. It's never life too much. It's always work too much. So yes, absolutely
Brian Glass:it is. It is interesting. We're going through a hiring cycle here, and it's interesting the number of people that come in and talk about I want to work somewhere where I have a greater work-life balance. And I'm like, all right, you're telling me that you currently work too much and you would like to work less. That's all I hear. When people come in and say that, It's just an interesting thing to say in like a job interview cycle. Anyway. So tell us about productivity gladiator to the service that you offer and the workshop and the the team style coaching that you do. Sure,
Brian Nelson-Palmer:absolutely. At its core productivity. Gladiator is a training and a certification that I offer, and it's about. Handling the overwhelm and all the stuff happening. It is a personal operating system for you. So we talked about the quadrants just a second ago. So how do you make decisions about planning your time so that you have a good life balance? It's about life balance and practical productivity. So I'll teach you how to get email inbox to zero, though you're not expected to do it all the time, but that is a skill that you might not have and I will teach you, or I've got, a system for all of the other stuff. Task and knowledge management. You need to remember to what you get from the store. You've got all this, you're sitting in a meeting and your boss tells you five things you need to do, and then you're. Your son or daughter tells you, Hey dad, don't forget to grab this from, the store on your way home. And there's all this stuff that you have to remember. So it's having an operating system for getting it out of your head, and how do you actually execute on all this stuff? And then also what happens when the list of stuff is too big and you can't do it? How do you prioritize it? How do you get through it? Because most people, when they hit that overwhelm point, that's when they hit the burnout and they can't keep going. So how do you work through that? So that's a very short kind of summary of what productivity gladiator is, the intent behind it. And so what I do is I offer training and certification. You can become a certified productivity gladiator. And what that means is I, for me, I am about, In practice actually showing the skills. So I'm gonna teach you all these skills. I'm gonna teach you about to-do list. I'm gonna teach you about a calendar and planning your week in advance. And then to get the certification, you actually have to show me that you actually planned your week in advance, like we said. So this isn't a test, this isn't one of those certifications where you're just gonna take a hundred question. It's not the bar. You are not studying for the bar with me. This is. I want to see you demonstrate the skill at least three times so that I know that you know how to do it, because that knowing that actual doing is way more effective than any studying or test taking that you could do. It's the practice of doing it, and then there's small group coaching in between for the people. So then it's, let me talk to your people. Let's teach the workshop, but then the next. Let's do a small group coaching session and now tell me all the places that it went off the rails for you, and let me help you understand the pieces that I didn't quite get or didn't quite click for you when we learned it in the workshop. So it's actually applying these skills. So that's what it is at its core. One of the things I wanted to offer for you, Brian, for the first person who wants to reach out, who listens to this episode and is interested, if you watch my TEDx talk, you're gonna see what I'm about for my time management thing that we've been talking about. So what I'd love to offer is for the per, for the first person who reaches out to me from this episode and asks, I'm happy to do an offer for a, a session, a 60 minute session for your team free of charge. So that, let's talk about this for your team, cuz I'd love to get to, Brian, I, talking with attorneys has been one of the most rewarding, especially the first through fifth year attorneys for me. There's a lot of folks, they come straight outta law school. They don't necessarily have a lot of life. Experience before sometimes, or some people, they just, oh, they, now they've hit this new income level because they had another job before and they made it through law school, and so now they're up here. And so how does that change things and how do you still stay on track toward that good life balance? The TEDx talk really helps with that. So by all means, if this topic's been interesting for you, share the TEDx. But I would love to come and actually do a session one-on-one. I've, I'll bring the calculator, I, we will talk about the examples of should you outsource your painting or landscaping and when it's worth it. And I'd love to actually have that conversation with your team so we can do it virtually. And I'll just, set up a zoom for the people in your office or whoever it is, just your team or a couple people, however you want to do it. But if you wanna reach out, I'm happy to do that. And Brian, I'm happy to do that for you too. Thanks for having me. It's a treat to. You said it exactly right, which is when I read about this show I reached out because my gosh, this is I totally agree with what you're doing. So I think it is so cool
Brian Glass:what you're doing with this process, and I can't help but laugh, but you, when you say it's rewarding to talk to lawyers, but then you hit the part that I think is rewarding, which is talking to the first, to the fifth year lawyer, which is exactly what I'm trying to do here because most first through fifth year lawyers don't have a good example. Above them. I like to think like when you look at what your boss's boss is doing, okay, is that the life that you really want? And if you're at a big firm, it's probably not right? You're probably trying to get through a couple of years, make a whole bunch of money, and then pivot and go find something else that you really want to do. It's probab. Like I, we talked to a guy a couple of weeks ago. Who's a senior partner. He's he's an insurance company's number one guy in the nation, right? Big insurance company's number one guy in the nation. And he'd worked 24 days in a row. And I, you're at the peak of your industry and the prize is you work 24 days in a row. And for some people that, some people might love that, but my suspicion is that most people who go to law school don't go to law school with That is the goal. And so trying to get in front of people who are younger than me and be a good being, a different example. Maybe not a good example, but be a different example of a style in which you can live your life has been really important to me and I know that it's really important to you. So I just wanna cycle back and make sure that we hit how people can contact you if they want to race to be number one and get that offer from you. How, what's the best way to get in touch with you? Go to
Brian Nelson-Palmer:productivity gladiator.com and at the bottom there's a contact. And use that, send me their, the email address is there. So ultimately either contact me through the website or send me an email that's on the website. Go there and reach out. I'd love to do that.
Brian Glass:Cool. I think that's a great place to end it. I will link everything that we talked about, the books, the Ted Talk your website in the show description. Brian, do you have any social that you want me to put out? Sure. Instagram,
Brian Nelson-Palmer:everything is LinkedIn at productivity, gladiator, all of it. Okay. LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. You can certainly follow me there if you're interested in the work stuff and some of the stuff I'm we're talking about on here, you can follow me there. Or I am at Brian Nelson Palmer for all of my personal stuff. So if you're interested in the personal stuff, I share some of that too. But, I, one of the skills I teach is to not spend all your time on social media. We touched on that earlier, Brian. I laugh about it I'm not on there, but if you wanna see some funny boat picks and something like that, we can be friends that way too
Brian Glass:yeah. Yeah. I wanna let you know that after listening to your TED Talk, I went through it, I put time limits on my phone for the first time in a while. So you've reached me. Yes. And so if I don't. Send you a LinkedIn or Instagram follow until tomorrow. That's why you reached your quota for today. Oh. That you've, at least, you've at least moved one of us. So I appreciate it. That I make smart. So happy. My, so happy. Thanks, man. All right. It's good having you, Brian.
Brian Nelson-Palmer:Absolutely. Thanks for talking today, Brian.