Afford Anything - Behind-the-Scenes Mastermind Call - with J.D. Roth

Episode Date: October 31, 2016

#49: If you're a longtime listener, you might remember J.D. Roth, founder of Get Rich Slowly and owner of Money Boss, from Episode 20. In this previous interview, J.D. shared how he went from being in debt to financially independent. Today, he's back for a special edition of the podcast. J.D. and I didn't actually record an interview for this episode. Instead, we hit "record" on one of our private mini-mastermind conversations, where we talk candidly about our businesses. By listening to this episode, you'll get a behind-the-scenes look at what's going on in the Afford Anything and Money Boss world - without any filters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything, and that's true not just of your money, but also your time, energy, focus, attention, any limited resource in your life. How are you going to spend those finite resources? What's the highest and best use of that for both your happiness and your success? My name is Paula Pat, host of the Afford Anything podcast where we answer those questions. Most episodes feature an interview. This one is a little bit different. In this episode, I invited J.D. Roth back onto the show. Now, those of you who have been listening for a while may remember that we interviewed J.D. Roth

Months ago in a previous episode. Episode 20. And in that interview, he talked about his journey from debt to financial independence. We'll link to that episode in the show notes, which is available at podcast.offordainthing.com. I didn't invite him back on to today's show to talk about that same topic. In fact, I didn't invite him back onto today's show to do a quote-unquote interview at all. Instead, as a little bit of background, Jady and I are pretty good friends. And every now and again, we'll just talk to each other frankly and directly and openly about our businesses.

What's happening? How are we growing? What are our obstacles? What are our opportunities? And we have a very direct conversation with one another about how we're going to focus the limited resources that are available at our disposal. So in this episode, I asked Jady if it was okay if I would just record one of our conversations and turn that into an episode because I want you guys to have a chance to hear those backstage conversations, the behind the scenes planning and strategizing that goes on behind how we grow our businesses. I'm just going to be straight up. Today's episode is very much centered around growing an online business, developing streams of online. income, entrepreneurship. It's very heavily themed around those topics. If that appeals to you, I think you're going to like today's episode. If you have no interest in that, then this episode may or may not be the right one for you. But if you are interested in learning more about

online entrepreneurship, this is a conversation that J.D. and I had with one another where we just hit record and let it flow. We have edited this a little bit to pick up the pace to make it more interesting and also to weed out some specific names that we mentioned for the sake of the privacy of our friends. But other than that, you're just going to hear a direct conversation, a little private mastermind, so to speak. So without further ado, J.D. Roth, the founder of Get Rich Slowly and now the proprietor of Moneyboss.com, one of the most established bloggers in the personal finance space, this is the conversation where he and I talk about the future of our businesses. I hope you enjoy it, and to paraphrase Seth Godin, more importantly, I hope you take action as a result.

Hello, Paula Pant. How you doing? Good, except for I can't figure out why the hell the sound is so loud in my ears. I'll try to talk quieter. I went to Rameet's thing in New York, his conference, and I came back very inspired to, like, I think I mentioned this, to stop around. and actually treat money boss in my work as a business. And I want to get going on it right away, but I have so many, like, loose ends that need to be tied up,

like selling the RV, getting new glasses. I mean, all these, like, stupid, stupid chores. So I can't, like, just jump right in and start treating money boss as a business because I got to get this other shit taken care of first, and it's pissing me off. I don't know. So I'm going to challenge you on that.

Okay, do it. If you don't tie up these loose ends, What is the worst case scenario that happens? There's a lot of mental weight for me. It weighs on me, Paula. It's like it's always in the back of my mind. I'm looking at it right now by whiteboard with the list of things that I know need to be done. And not all of them need to be done right away, but some of them do need to be done.

And I need to get new glasses, for example. That's a legitimate health thing, so I will give that one a pass. What else? Let's look at it. See, some of them I can just let slide. Boom, bump, bump, bump the RV thing. The RV thing is a legitimate thing that hangs over my head. And it's something that bothers Kim.

And so Kim is going to keep poking at me. She's been poking me for the past couple weeks. How come the RV isn't sold? Can she sell it? Oh, that's a great question. You know, I should offer her, oh, wow. Look at this. Offer Kim 10%.

Perfect. Done. You know, she'd be all over that. Great idea. Awesome. Cool. Solve that problem. Yeah, yeah. The Mini Cooper's in bad shape. That's got to be taken in and given a tune up and repaired.

The motorcycle is too late now. That thing's until the spring. You own a lot of engines. Yeah, I know. Pretty hilarious, huh? The orthodontist, I've got to get down to the fucking orthodontist. I've been back three months. I haven't gone to see him. Okay, so the orthodontist is a health thing.

So that makes sense to me. the Mini Cooper, do you drive it regularly? Yes, but I mean, not a lot. I think I posted recently that I'm getting six miles a day on it on average. Okay, so can you just let it slide? Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. Okay, then why not continue to let it slide? You know what?

I know exactly what I need to do. Create A, B, C, list of chores slash errands. Ah, yeah, prioritizing. those. Yep. Because some of these are A, some are B, some are C's. And I think what's bugging me is I don't have it prioritized. And also, you can't see the whiteboard, but I have business mixed in with personal.

And so it's just all, basically, it's a brain dump and it's created jumble and it's, mm. Right. Oh, good. Right, right. So the key, I've also played with organizing those to do lists into A, B, and C. the key is to limit the number of things that are allowed to go on the A and B list. Because, you know, like A can have a maximum of three. You know, like B can have, you know, like you've got to set quantifiable limits because otherwise everything can get dumped into A.

Exactly. And some, I don't have a problem with some bubbling up. Like, once I get the A's, well, no, they shouldn't even bubble up. It's just if there are no A's, then I move on to the B's. That's how the bubble up works. Right. Did you, okay, go ahead. Oh, and I was going to say, and then the other part of it is like finding people who can do this stuff.

Because one of the major things that I've learned is that there are certain things that only you can do. This is a concept actually that came from Laura Vandercam. There are certain things that only you can do. Right. And there are other things that, you know, other people can do. The best way to arrange your priorities is to do the things that only you can do and find others to do the rest. So again, going back to taking your mini-Cooper in, someone else can do that. Either Kim or you could hire a personal assistant.

Somebody else could do that. There's somebody who, for like, 30 bucks an hour, would be happy to, like, run errands for you and take your car into the shop and, like, do all of that stuff. It's true. And I've thought about this. Well, that's why I'm having these conversations later this week and next week. I'm meeting with people and I'm going to see whether I can't hire one or two people to take some of the stuff off me. Because you're absolutely right, Paula, some sort of assistant. I mean, Rameet, he and I chatted briefly.

And, you know, he essentially has a personal assistant that is, I don't think she's with him all day long, but she takes care of shit for him. And just so he basically says, Laura or whatever her name is, this needs to happen. And it could be something personal like him scheduling an appointment or it could be something with the business. And then she's the one who, so it comes out of his head, somebody else takes care of it. And it all works great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

I've got an assistant like that for my business. And it's amazing. I call her my chief sanity officer. Was she a friend before? No, no. I found her through the FinCon community. Really? Yeah.

I hired her initially. She worked with me maybe five to ten hours a week, and now she's up to like 25 to 30. And she works as an independent contractor? Yeah, 1099 contractor. She completely remote. She has moved around. She's lived in several different states in the time that she's worked with me. How much do you pay her for something? 25 an hour. And then that's about what I would think, too. Yeah. Yeah. And then when the course launches, I'm going to give her a large bonus because she has been so instrumental in helping with that. And so she handles personal things as well as business things?

No, so she is only, she only does business things because I found that a lot of my personal tasks are location-based. They need to happen here in Vegas. Absolutely. And so what I would really like is to have a physical personal assistant here in Vegas who can handle all those little tasks. Because again, there are certain things that only I can do, like writing blog posts or afford anything, I truly believe that that is something that I should never outsource. That is

something that I should always be doing. Hosting these podcast episodes, that's something that only I should be doing. Thinking about the growth of the company, that is something only I, well, myself and, you know, trusted mentors and advisors and will and all, you know, that's something that I cannot separate myself from, you know, like, as an owner, my core function is making decisions and crafting that vision. My core function is not making sure that we have enough kale in the refrigerator. Exactly. So it just makes sense. If something, if I'm going to sacrifice something, then the thing that I should sacrifice is getting somebody else to put the kale in the

fridge so that I can be thinking about the two-year trajectory of this company. Absolutely. You know what's a challenge for me is the dog, because I was thinking about this over the last couple of days. She does take two or three hours a day of walking time. And I could absolutely pay somebody in the building to walk. There are a couple of people who have offered. They would do it for like $10 a walk. And that's not bad, especially if I get to the point where I'm generating more than $10 an hour. But having said that, I also recognize that the walking time, it's exercise for me. It's good for my sanity. It's absolutely good for my mental health. and it's a time to bond with her. So that's not a problem we need to solve right now, but I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking that one out loud. It may be that I do hire out the afternoon walk, for example. It would be a balance. I could say, okay, I do the morning walk and I pay somebody 10 bucks a day to do the

afternoon walk. Right. And, you know, and so this goes back to Laura Vandercombe's framework of what are the things that only I myself can do versus what can other people do? Because within that framework, you know, you can't hire somebody to, you know, you can't hire somebody to exercise on your behalf. Right. And so if the benefit of walking the dog is exercise, then that is something that only

you can do. You can't hire somebody to, like, lower your cortisol levels and de-stress you. You know, that's something that only you can do. So in that framework, you're absolutely adhering to, like, this is something that I cannot outsource. Those are benefits that I myself am responsible for. And so once you achieve the optimal amount of that, you know, so maybe from the morning walk you achieve the optimal amount of that, then basically you've got, even though it on the surface looks like the same activity, there are multiple things that come out of that activity. There are benefits that cannot be outsourced like exercise.

And then there is the function, the surface level function of what people see, which is walking the dog. So you have to just delineate what portion of this is exercise and what. what portion of this is an action that needs to be taken. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if I said that very well. I'm sure there's a... You did. You did. And it's, I got to figure it out. Part of me thinks that I should just say to Kim, hey, why don't you stay home and I pay you to be the assistant? You know, there are drawbacks to that too. I don't know how well you and we'll work together. Kim and I tend to work pretty well together. But I've talked to other people who work with their partners and they're like, yeah, it's better not to.

Yeah, Will and I, we tried that, or we've tried many different types of arrangements. So for a while, we kind of tried that arrangement where I was like, okay, Will, I want to put you in charge of domestic management so that I can really focus on the growth of this company. It blurs the line between business and personal a little too much, particularly when people have different expectations. So I found that that was just not an optimal arrangement. That was one of my criticisms of that. The other criticism of that arrangement that we tried is that the highest and best use of his time and talent is not vacuuming. Right. The highest and best use of his talent is to focus on some of the aspects of the company that are not my strong suit.

So, for example, I haven't admitted this publicly yet, but we're developing our own proprietary software. He's really been instrumental in developing the vision for that and figuring out, you know, like, okay, what do we need to do in terms of user interface, design, development, idea validation, testing. Yeah. You know, he's really taken the lead on that. That is a much better use of his time than him just doing chores and errands. So the other example of something that Will has been doing for the businesses, when the course launches, right now I've got 50 beta testers. Wow.

I am like, as I produce material for this rental property investing course. And it's just a video course, audio course? It is, yes. It's a video course with a transcript. So the workflow basically is that I write out the course, like the first module. Yes. How to analyze a potential rental property. I wrote that out.

That came to 40,000 words. So it was a significant writing project. Absolutely. Then I emailed that to the beta testers. They gave me feedback. I edited that based on their feedback. And then I chopped it up into bite-sized lessons. And then recorded myself talking out those lessons on video.

So we got a teleprompter. I fed those lessons into the teleprompter and then set up a little home recording studio. And I've, you know. So you did all of the recording from home. Yeah, yeah. And you got, I didn't even know, it would never occur to me to buy a teleprompter. Yeah. Dude, a teleprompter is great.

I can't believe I've lived without one for so long. I'm looking them up on Amazon right now. Oh my God, they're amazing. Because like, what's your alternative? What are you going to like memorize every line and then like, you know, that would you just be an editing. They're not that expense. They're only a couple hundred bucks. Right.

Yeah, dude. Wow. That's, okay. That's outstanding. Now, look, I'm going to set up a home studio too eventually. Yeah, we got two different cameras. So there's like a front angle and a side angle. Oh, wow.

So that the video can like switch between the two just so there's. And you know, the real benefit to that, I was, I initially thought that the benefit would just be adding some more visual interest into the videos. Right. But the real benefit is that when we need to. to edit a video, like if I trip up in the middle of a sentence, or if the sound, the audio clips or something in the middle of a sentence, we can facilitate that transition just by switching video frames.

Yep. Yep. That's smart. Yeah. So that is the actual benefit to having two different cameras pointing at me when I'm doing the talking head recording. The thing that I've learned through this beta tester experience is, so for example, I've always wanted to have a very generous refund policy. So with the beta testers, thank goodness this happened, somebody wanted to refund.

And in my head, I was like, oh, yeah, that's just really simple. You just give them the money back and that's the end of it, right? But it actually takes a lot of different integrations because not you've got Stripe or whatever other. their payment processing system that you're using, which refunds the money. Then you've got the sequence of emails that they're getting, which is directed through convert kit or whatever other email management program that you're using, that they need to be taken off of. Then you've got the Facebook group or whatever other forum that they're on, that students are on, that they need to be removed from, you know, and then like you want to do some sort of an exit interview with them

to get their feedback about the course. You know, so there's all. of these different things that have to happen when a person refunds. And they're all, they're all managed through different systems. Like the payment processing system is not the same as the email user-based system, right? So then you need something like Zapier to make all of these different systems talk to each other. Is Zapier? I've never even heard of this. Yeah, it becomes a huge like programming management like monster, basically. You know, it's a huge, it's a huge. It's a huge behind-the-scenes management task. There are all these people who are like, well, what does a blogger do other than write?

And I'm like, oh, my God, you don't even know, you know. But like, so that is kind of, that's what you have to do behind the scenes in terms of building and executing a course. And if my goal is to spend my time writing, then I can't be handling all of that. And yes, I have an assistant, my chief sanity officer, who handles a lot of tasks for me, like she handles social media planning through Edgar, for example. But it would be, at this point at least, too amorphous of a project for me to say, hey, we have all of this different software and I need you to figure out a way to make these different systems talk to one another.

I need you to figure out a way to make our payment processing software, talk to our bookkeeping software, talk to our bookkeeping software, talk to our. email marketing software. Can you do that? Like, that's not a, that's not a task for a $25 an hour assistant, you know? And so that is where hiring a CEO becomes essential. I think it's interesting. You bring up a good point. So, you know, I've been blogging since before blog was even a word. Sometime next year, I think it's like August 2017, I will celebrate by 20-year anniversary of blogging. Holy. I know, I'm old. Damn.

And it is really, really changed in that time. And a lot of what I call the old school bloggers, we began talking about that amongst ourselves about how it's changed. And of course, we're old. We're like, man, things are better than the old day. But some of it isn't necessarily better in the old day. Some of it's better now. But it's definitely more complicated. So for me, and I think for you too, Paula, we have to choose which channels, first of all, are we good at?

and which channels are going to provide the maximum benefit for us. Right. So for me right now, although I want to produce a video course, that's about the only video content that I'm thinking about producing. I'm just at this point, I am not considering video because that's just, that's a whole other thing that I would have to learn. And so it's a channel that I'm going to leave alone. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I think that you need to be selective because it's better to be amazing at a few. things than it is to be mediocre at a lot of things. I agree 100%. I see this with real estate investing

too. I mean, there are so many ways to invest in properties, right? Like you could you could buy and hold rental properties, you could flip houses, you could wholesale, you could invest in tax liens. Those are all like different strategies for how to make money from a property. And then there are also different classes of properties, right? So you've got residential, you've got commercial, within the commercial division. You've got offices, retail spaces, warehouses. You know, you've got mobile home parks. You've got bare land. There's all of these different types of real estate as well. And when you first get into that space, it's so tempting to want to do everything. Because everything sounds like a good opportunity. You know, so you're like, oh, I could speculate on bare land and I could own a

bunch of mobile home parks and I could buy a 40 unit apartment building and I could own a shopping mall. The problem with that is that each one of those requires a different skill set and a different way of thinking. And sure, you can hire people to execute on your decisions, but the one thing that you can never outsource is making decisions. Like, ultimately the most important thing that an owner does is think. And you have to think about different things when you invest in bare land, then you think about when you invest in residential rental properties. And so any time that you spend thinking about bare land speculation is time that you're not thinking about residential investment. Right. And so that is, when I figured that out, I just narrowed my focus only

to residential rental properties in the United States. That's a manageable enough bite. It's a bite that you can chew. And I think that that's critical because then I can focus, like, decision-making ability around that bite, you know? And the same, I think, is true in any business. And online businesses are just another variant of that, where you can have a blog and a podcast and a YouTube change,

channel and a this and a that and a blah, and blah, and blah, but if you try to, if you're spinning all of those wheels, if you are trying to be everywhere, at a certain point, you're just creating noise. And there's so much noise on the internet that the way to stand out is by being good, not by being noisy. Absolutely. And you're creating more work for yourself. And as you say, the quality diminishes. Right. To me, the tough part is knowing when to make these moves. I mean, again, going back to me right now, I'm fortunate because from the sale of get rich slowly, I have a large nest egg. But that's my retirement nest egg. And I'd like to not touch that. But on the other hand, Money Boss is only producing a few hundred dollars a month. So it's not like I have

the revenue there to be able to, in a cash flow positive way, hire people to help with things that I want help with. Right. And so I've got to make the decision. Do I take my personal money and inject it into the business? And right now, I think that is the decision I have to be. And I have to be. And I have to make. Again, if I think it's going to take $20,000, paying somebody or paying people a total of $20,000 in 2017 to help me with some of the stuff I need help with, I need to ask myself, is that going to produce more than $20,000 in the long run? And I think absolutely it would, because it would free me to work on the stuff that I need to do to build out the site. But what if you're somebody else in the position that I'm at? And you don't have that extra money to put in,

inject into the business. I don't know. I don't know what I would do if I were just starting from scratch. Well, I think that certain things have to be held sacred, right? So like not going into debt for a business. That to me, that's just a boundary that you don't cross. But beyond that, many people do cross it. Yeah. To me, it's a boundary that you don't. For me personally, so for a rental property, yeah, I would get a mortgage on a rental property. That's a different type of business. But for a blog, for a podcast, no, I would never go into debt for something like that. Because I deficit spent. When I started to get rich slowly... The deficit spending isn't the same as going into debt, you know?

Oh, no. It's not... Again, I have the personal funds that I can allocate to start it. So when I started to get rich slowly in 2006, I had almost nothing in costs. Maybe $20 a month. Maybe that was my, it might not have even been that. And then as the site grew, I eventually got to where I had $250 or $500 a month in cost. I remember when I went to sell the site, the people I was selling to, they're like, okay, what's your revenue? I showed them the revenue. They're like, okay, that's a nice number.

And then what are your expenses? And I showed them the expenses. They're like, what that? Are you kidding me? Because in practical terms, my expenses were essentially zero. From a business perspective, they were zero. They're $500 a month, but when you're bringing in tens of thousand dollars a month, it's nothing. And but nowadays, I guess it doesn't have to be true.

But for me, starting money boss, I put $8,000 into it in 2015 just to get it started. $8,000. And now I have, I don't actually have the monthly expenses set up because I haven't charted them since I got home from Savannah. I've just paid the money, and I need to actually, that's another one of my chores that I need to do is sit down and do my business finances. But I think I'm spending, let's say, roughly $200 a month on it. And I'm netting maybe $250. So it's just, it's another way that blogging nowadays, for me, is different than it was 10 years ago.

But I'm also saying that I did take some of my personal money, and I'm going to do it again for 2017, take some of my personal money to invest into the site in order to help it grow. Right. So I don't understand why people are so reluctant to put personal money into a business. Like, this is one of the best investments that you can make. Because if you invest in a broad market index fund, historically, you're going to get, what, 8, 9%, 10% maybe. In a business, you're going to do, you have the potential to do so much better. I don't know why I'm so reluctant to do it either.

I mean, it's not just me. There are other people who are reluctant to do it also. And as you said earlier, it's not necessarily a great idea if you're having to go into debt to do it. I'm having to go into debt. I'm investing money that I already have. Exactly. Exactly. So like that, I mean, that's the reason that I encourage people not to think of it as deficit spending because like so many people like to conflate deficit with debt.

No, debt is when you owe money to a credit card company. That is a line that I'm never going to cross for a blog or a podcast or anything other than a rental property. For anything other than a mortgage, I should say. Okay. That is just a line I'm never going to cross. But if it's money that I've already earned, what's my other, like, what else would I do with that money? Repaint my house, update my bathroom, buy a nicer car. Like, really, what is the worst case scenario?

It's that I will have lived more frugally than I otherwise. would have needed to. That's the worst case scenario. Hey, have you ever wanted to talk to a financial advisor just to ask like one question, maybe two? Well, guess what? Nerd Wallet has this cool new app that lets you have one-on-one conversations with financial advisors through your phone, and it's available at no cost to you. You can chat with an advisor about anything related to money, such as retirement,

investing, insurance, debt, all things money related. And you'll get personalized one-on-one advice. Check it out at no cost to you by going to nerd. me slash paula. That's nerd.m-e-slash Paula, P-A-U-L-A. Well, for me, what's funny is in the olden days, I was so liberal with my money and I would spend it on just about anything and I would make crazy, risky investments.

Nowadays, I'm the opposite. I'm so cautious. I'm not necessarily frugal in my personal life. I'm not profligate, but I'm just kind of average. But now I'm just so cautious about spending money, especially on the business that, I don't know. I need to get over that. I need to change my mindset back to the old entrepreneurial JD mindset.

I think the issue with me, when I sold Get Rich slowly, I made this mental shift to I am retired. I am retired and this is the money that I'm going to live on and it's my retirement savings and I need to protect it. And so maybe what I need to do, I just had a bond mature on Saturday, $35,000 municipal bond. You know what? I could just pull that money out and say this is my, it's my seed money, basically. The seed money for money boss.

I feel like I could do that and say, because I find it very, very unlikely that I would ever burn through the $35,000. I'm in a deficit spend for a little bit. Don't call it that. You are going to invest $35,000 into your company. When you buy an index fund, do you call it deficit spending? No, no, no. A deficit spent on VTSAX the other day.

I love that you're kicking my a-hs on that. Okay, I'm going to understand. Invest, I should invest that money because I moved all the money that I used to have in my business accounts out of my business accounts. And so now there's nothing there. But I'm going to shift a bunch over there. I'm going to invest a bunch into my business accounts and use that to help the site grow. I think the downsides are minimal. Again, if I move 20,000 over, the downside is $20,000. If I move $35,000 over, the downside is $35. So, I I know it sounds like we're talking about big numbers because if you've got listeners who are living paycheck to paycheck, I don't actually know what your audience is like. But that can sound like they're big numbers. But from a business perspective, they're not that huge. Right. And when you consider that my savings are substantial, they're not that huge either.

It's a risk, but it's a minimal risk. Right. I can afford to lose it. Like, you know, the word, okay, what's the worst case scenario? It goes to zero. Yeah. So what? So then it goes.

goes to zero and then I move on, you know? Yeah. And then I've got to reduce my spending by, I think it would, I'm just doing the math off the top of my head, but I'm guessing it's like $120, $125 a month for the rest of my life is how much I would reduce my spending then. Yeah. So if the worst case scenario is like living a little bit more frugally in order to have a chance at your dreams, it doesn't make any sense to me why people who like, who have a dream and

who have a goal and who really want to achieve something are like, oh, but I can't give up this money that I otherwise would have spent on pedicures to do that. Like, really? Okay, well, what's more important to you? And you actually accidentally hit on something very important to me right there. You know, at MoneyBoss, I preach that in your personal life, you need to have these missions because that's what businesses do, that they have mission statements. I want you to have personal mission statement.

And while I have a mission statement for Money Boss, I don't actually have like a clear vision or a clear goal or a clear direction. Part of what I think making me apprehensive is I don't have this clear vision of the direction I'm going because I've lost my way. I've lost sight of it. And I need to have that in front of me so that I'm like, oh, yeah. Do you have a clear vision of where you want to take, afford anything, the company? Yes, absolutely. I know exactly where I want us to be in five years. and I've reverse calculated that to see exactly where we need to be every year for the next five years in order to achieve that.

And is this a written plan? Yes. So I've got two whiteboards in my office. One of them has that five-year plan on it. And then the other whiteboard is where I sketch out more like day-to-day ideas. But the five-year board, not only do I know exactly what I want. I know exactly how many email subscribers I hope we have in five years. I know exactly how much revenue I hope we have in five years.

I have the organizational chart written for what the structure of the company would look like. And I have actually written out exactly who I want to hire. And these are people, these are like top, top performers who are going to be difficult to recruit. I'm going to have to poach some people. I'm going to have to head hunt. I love the idea of having a long-term board and a day-to-day board. I'm looking at my office three white boards but they're not

they're just kind of randomly set up and again they're a place for me to do my brain dump and have all these tasks looming down at me but I think I need to set it up so that it is much I need to treat this business like it's a business instead of just half a shit like I've been doing you work out of your house right

yeah across the way from the condo here there's a commercial office building And part of me wants to go rent a space there. But rumor has that they're very, very expensive spaces. But still, it would be nice to just walk over there, take the dog with me, and have this separate space where I get my work done. I did that when I had get rich slowly. At first, I was working out of the house. And Chris and I had a lot of conflicts.

This was back when I was still married because the expectation was that when I was home, I would be doing errands or working on the house. And plus, I would find a waste of fritter away my time when I was at home. And so having the separate space that I rented when I was doing Get Rich slowly really, really helped. It got a lot of the business stuff out. It created this sharp division between work time and playtime or home time. And I'm not opposed to reverting to that. Yeah. You know, one of the, like paradoxically, people go towards self-employment and entrepreneurship

in order to take more control of their schedules and their time. But I found that it's actually incredibly helpful to have structured apps. hours during the day. Like, one of my readers emailed me a couple of weeks ago and she was like, you know, why do you wake up to an alarm? Why do you do that? You don't have to. And I'm like, yeah, I don't quote unquote have to in the sense that there is no boss breathing down my neck. Like I'm not going to get fired if I don't. But I'm also not going to grow. So like that, the motivation now is it's intrinsic rather than external. Yeah. I'm internally motivated. because there is this thing that I want to accomplish.

And nobody is telling me that I have to accomplish it, but this is the thing that I want to do because this is what brings purpose and joy to my life. And I'm willing to wake up, I wake up before sunrise because I want this to happen, you know. And I've structured my time and my home and my life in such a way that, you know, I've maximized the probability of, making this happen. And I live significantly more frugly than I have to so that I can use my

personal money to give this the fuel that it needs. I think that's so smart. So do you also then impose structure on your days? Are your days pretty scheduled? Yeah. Yeah, they are. So I wake up before sunrise. I have a morning routine that involves, among other things, meditation, some yoga, a little bit of exercise, just a little bit of exercise. I'm not super great at that, but reading, journaling, you know, that's all kind of part of the morning routine. Right. And then I work, and I work until at least, I'm bad at having a cutoff time in the evening, but I work until about dinner time-ish. I would like to set a hard cut-off time, but, you know, like the traditional working hours, nine to five, those I'm always working.

And in fact, even before that, I usually start quite a bit earlier. And I'll take, you know, I'll take breaks throughout the day. Right. I sometimes take, like, 30-minute midday naps. Or I'll take a gym break in the middle of the day. So, like, I might have a block of 11 or 12 hours during the day that I'll be working. But within those 11 or 12 hours, I have all of these breaks inside of that, you know, that are like 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, so that that 12-hour workday is actually only about eight hours, eight or

nine hours of actual work. Right. But chunking off that time and blocking off that time and saying, you know, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. or from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. to 7 p.m. I'm not going to do anything personal. 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. is work time. And if I have to take a break, I'm taking that break for the purpose of rejuvenation so that I can come back to work focused. Yeah. Having those boundaries, I think, is essential because it just keeps your eye on the game.

It keeps you focused. See, I've done a very poor job. Again, because I had in my mind that I was retired, but for the past few years, my days have been unstructured. There have been some advantages to that, but there have been some disadvantages too. And now that I want to be working again, now that I have a website that I want to grow and build, I feel like I need to resume the structure. And I've been trying to think about how I can do that because with my ADD problems, I need, as you're talking about, some sort of extrinsic, I don't want to call it extrinsic motivation, but having this outside force, even though it's coming from me, creating the structure for my day, I think will be very, very helpful. I think back to college or high school, it was great to have my time. I knew where I was supposed to be when.

And so that's the approach that I'm going to try to take with my day, the routine. And then also at FinCon last month, I talked with My Gavardi, who runs a site called The Productivityist. Yes. He's really good. He talks about, I don't actually know how he phrases it in his materials, but what I took away is to chunk your days. Basically, theme your days, I guess it'd be a way to do it. So I just pulled up the email I sent to myself after the New York conference where I sat down and I wrote out what I want to do. and Monday is going to be my money boss day.

That's when I take care of all things money boss. Tuesday is a business development day, and that's where I handle email, I work with possible advertisers, and I do long-term planning and that sort of thing. Wednesday is my day for other projects, so I have other websites that I want to run. That's where I handle those. Thursday, I call it my connection day, and so that's where I'm going to handle social media. That's where I'm going to, I get a lot of lunch requests, but I'm going to try to lump everything on to Thursday.

So I might have three meetings on Thursday. And then Friday is my chores and errands day, basically my domestic day. And I think if I do this, I know I'm only giving one day for Money Boss, two, if you count the business development day. But I think having this structured time that's dedicated to specific tasks, I think it's going to pay off in the long run. I think it will really allow me to get more done. I mean, 20 focused hours are more powerful than 40 unfocused.

focused hours. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And let me look, what I, eight o'clock is what time I'm starting to work every day. Eight o'clock and I'm working until four o'clock. Four o'clock is what give the dog her afternoon walk. So that's eight hours a day and it's pretty focused. And admittedly, I mean, like Thursday, the Connection Day, a lot of that's going to be out dealing with colleagues and friends. Instead of having all this, I'm jumping from one thing to another, like tomorrow is just a mess. I look at my calendar and I'm working. and then I'm going off to meet somebody, then I come back and I work some more, then I have to go out and do an errand, then I come back.

And so that's just all wasted time. And I'm going to be much more efficient this way. And this goes back to what you and I've talked about in the past where you and I both did the project where we logged how we're spending our time. And I noticed that I had a lot of wasted time where I'm shifting from one thing to another. And so I'm trying to just like block everything related to one task or theme or type of project all on the same day. Yeah.

Okay. So I'm going to read you right now. Just a quote from one of my favorite, this is a blog post by Paul Graham. He writes about the schedule of a maker versus a manager. Oh, this is going to be good. Oh, my God. It's amazing. I have it saved.

I could pull it up so quickly because I've saved, I've bookmarked it. So every time I open Google Chrome, I see it. Like I see the link to it. He says, there are two types of schedules, which I'll call the manager schedule and the maker schedule. The manager schedule is for. for bosses, and it's embodied in the traditional appointment book with each day cut into one-hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default, you change what you're doing every hour. When you use time that way, it's merely a practical

problem to meet with someone, find an open slot in the schedule, book them, and you're done. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers, creatives. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started. Amen. When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster.

A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon by breaking it into two pieces. each too small to do anything hard in. Plus, you have to remember to go to the meeting. Yeah. And so it goes on from there, but this blog post was just, it phrased the struggle that I had been having so well. Because the distraction, like when you have a meeting, the time commitment is not just the meeting itself.

It's the distraction that comes from knowing that you're going to have to go to that. And it's getting pulled off the task. It's the Cal Newport refers to this as like attention residue. You know, every time you task switch, there's a little bit of attention residue. And for me, I talked about this with Benny Lewis in New York recently, when he and I are focused, because he and I both have ADD and we need to pay attention to what we're doing. When he and I are focused on a project, if our partners come in and even if they're doing something sweet, like giving it us a kiss or just saying hi or saying I love you, when they do that, it can throw us off for five, 10, 15 minutes. And that might sound ridiculous to some people listening, but it's true.

It's because you're so focused on what you're doing, what you're writing, that that break, and especially if it's a conversation, I mean, I kiss hello or something, okay, fine. But if it's a conversation about like, what are we doing this weekend, it can really mess me up. And that's that attention residue, I guess. It's also my ADHD, but still. Right. Will knows that when the door to my home office is closed, the door's closed. If there's something that he needs to say to me, he can send me an email and I'll see it whenever I check my email next.

Yeah. But when the door's closed, the door's closed and I don't want to be interrupted. Yeah. It's interesting to the makers. I pulled up the maker schedule, manager's schedule. I'm going to read the whole article after we're done talking. Yeah. He effectively, you know, he says that if you are going to be a creative who makes things, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.

Yep. That is just, it's paramount. And business people in Silicon Valley have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free if you're on the manager's schedule. And they're so common that there's this distinctive language for proposing them, such as saying that you want to, quote, grab coffee. speculative meetings like these, however, are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule. Because you'd lose half a day's work, right? Yeah.

Like I get these emails all the time from, you know, people who are like, do you want to grab coffee? Can we jump on a call? And I'm like, you're going to kill my writing for a day, you know? So I have one day a week in which I take all meetings, all calls, all podcast and reviews, all of this happens on one day a week. Yes, and for me, that's going to be Thursday. I mean, that's my connection day. I get requests for my brain width, is what I call it.

Yeah, exactly. I get it all the time. I had a guy email me yesterday. He sent me a long email. And first of all, long emails, I'm just like, oh, man, really? Can't you just ask me in two sentences? And I read through this long email. And essentially, he just wanted to quote about one thing.

And I had to read these five paragraphs. But he didn't, he's wanted to create this relationship. I can tell he's wanting an ongoing relationship. It's just going to, and I'm not opposed to ongoing relationships with new people. I don't want to make it sound like that. But he's doing it in a way that's very time-consuming and costly for me and my attention. And I get requests like that all the time. I'm much more open when I'm in a situation like, say, at a conference where I'm in the mode to be able to connect with people is much easier for me to do that.

Or if somebody says, hey, can we meet for coffee? And then I know, all right, now I'm going to schedule for Thursday. In the past, I would schedule it for any day. That's a great way to do it. But to send me an email and basically wanting to be... Your new BFF. I know. It's just...

Right. So the answer to that is always no. I mean... Exactly. In the past, my answer has been to ignore the email, but that's not good either. That's destructive rather than productive. Yeah, yeah. So the answer is, hey, I'm swamped right now.

you know, can't meet or, uh, or I host reader meetups once, uh, once every six months. You know, you can come to the next one, subscribe to the email list or, you know, or I'll post on Facebook when I have the next one. But I mean, like, I used to feel guilty about that for a long time. But then I realized that I'm devoting out, like disproportionate outsized attention to like the 10 people who have demanded individual one-on-one attention. at the expense of the more than 100,000 people who come to my website every month. So, like, what's more important serving those 10 people or serving the 100,000?

And there's a balance to be had because, I mean, the people that are writing to you, they're also your superfans. But at the same time, I don't know. For me, this is part of why I need to hire an assistant because the assistant can perform triage, You can go through the email and say, J.D., you really should take care of this. This sounds like it is something that's important. Or maybe they could be the one to reply to the person and say, hey, J.D.'s busy. If you can be more specific about your request and only send two lines instead of five paragraphs, he can help you out. Exactly.

So again, I keep bringing up Cal Newport. I know. He talks about this quite a bit. You know, he talks about how people fire off an email that may. or may not have even taken them that long to write. But for you to answer it, it takes not just your time, but yeah, your brain width, your bandwidth. It takes your energy. And that energy has to come from somewhere. At a certain point, you just have to make the decision. I can do anything but not everything. So what's it going to be? One of the ways that I've kind of dealt with this

is on the podcast, having a monthly Ask Paula. Oh, yeah. And that has been fantastic because that's a vehicle that people, if someone has a question, they can leave a voicemail at, you know, it's afford anything.com slash voicemail. They can leave a voicemail. The recording is limited to 90 seconds. So it cannot go over that amount of time. And then once a month, I can sit down, listen to the voicemails, batch process them, record my answers, and broadcast. and broadcast them so that the entire audience can benefit. So then it's not just like, you know, five people who are benefiting each of whom are individually in their silos benefiting from the answer. It's the entire community that can benefit.

So I'm having a one on, the conversation is one on one times 10,000, you know? Right. So that, that has been excellent. And the reason that I decided to do it as a voicemail, in the voicemail form, What's twofold. One is that I think it's more interesting on a podcast to literally hear other people's voices. But number two is because when we first started doing this, this was back when I was still co-hosting this podcast with Jay Money, we invited people to email us questions. And holy, I mean, we got these long, rambling emails that like, so then we copy and pasted these onto like a Google document. And it was like within a couple of days, we had like, I think it was a 24 page Google document just in the first. few days. And it, like, it was, we couldn't process it. It was too much. So we had to develop a system to do something about it. And so that system is leave a voicemail that can be a maximum of 90 seconds. And boom, that's the system. That's what you've got to do.

I think that's fantastic. It puts a little bit of a barrier to entry. I think that you and I've hit on a very important point in two topics in a row here. And that is when you're communicating with somebody that you know has limited time or it might get a lot of emails, keep your emails short and to the point. It's a, I'm not trying to sound like a thing or anything, but seriously, I'm going to open up a random email here. Boom. Oh, see, that's a nice one. That's three sentences long. I can reply to that. I am much more likely to reply to an email that's three sentences long than I am one that's three paragraphs long. And it's not because I don't, I'm trying to play favorites or anything like that, is that I want to be able to

give you a good solid reply. And the more information you give me, first of all, it takes longer to process the information, but then it's going to take me longer to reply too. And I don't know. From my own struggles, I've learned that when I email people for people that I know are busy or get a lot of email, I keep things very short and I use, I make liberal use of bold and highlighting in my email so they can go directly to the point. If they don't have time to read all the other stuff around it. They can just read the very core of the message. Yeah. And sometimes I just send a, I also like to say no reply needed too. That's a nice technique. Yeah. I'm just trying to send somebody a piece of information. I don't want them to think

they have to reply to me. Yeah. You know, I don't email people that often because the more emails you send, the more you get. Absolutely. For email was becoming a huge distraction for me for a while. and I finally realized that if I just check my email less and reply to emails less, I will eventually just start getting fewer emails. Right. That's a great idea in theory. Not just in theory, in reality also. But for me, one of the ways that I try to create engagement with my MoneyBoss subscribers is when I send my emails out,

first of all, I have like this 10-week introductory course. And in three of the emails, including the very first one, I ask them to reply to me and send me their goals or what their plans are for certain things. And then in the periodic emails that I send out, I sometimes ask for them to reply to. So I know I'm creating work for myself by doing that. See, I used to do that, actually. I did that for maybe about a year. In my first auto responder to new subscribers, I would say, hey, I've got two questions

for you. You know, what are your goals and what is getting in your way? And I would tell them straight up, I was like, hey, I don't have time to reply to each of these answers, but I will read them. And the problem that I started facing was that even though I clearly stated, I clearly set the expectation that I'm not going to reply, I still felt guilty about not replying. Yeah, I do too. I felt so guilty.

And so every time, for a year, every time I checked my inbox, felt guilty. And that's a sh**ty way to check your inbox. It's just a shi-shitty way to go to work. I just wrote down a task for myself. All of those replies that I asked people to send me, they go to my inbox. I need to have them automatically archive so that I can go when I have the time, I can go and say into the goals label because they already get labeled. I can go in and read what people's goals are because that's useful information to me too.

It tells me what my readers, what their goals are, what their desires are, and what topics they need me to address. Oh, okay. So I have a suggestion. for you. So I did the same thing. Yeah, I didn't literally mean they were in my primary inbox. Oh, well, they are in my primary inbox. Oh, God. Yeah. No, don't do that. No, no, they weren't literally in my primary inbox. But I still, every time, every day, I knew that there were more. You know, every day I could see that. I could see it growing and I would go in and I would read them and

people sent such detailed replies. And I just felt bad. You know, like, I just, I felt bad that I couldn't respond to each one. And I would respond to some of them, but not others. And then some people would say, like, oh, I'm really looking forward to hearing from you, or I really hope you write back. Or I know you don't have time to reply to all of them, but could you just reply to mine? Like, people would say that. So, yeah.

So eventually, I just, I stopped asking for people to reply. But I don't really like that either because I want to know the answer to those questions, because it informs what I do. It informs the writing. that I create and the podcast episodes that I create. Like, you know, it makes this a two-way street, and I think that that's very valuable. Well, and that's why for me, when I do hire my assistant soon, I think the number one task that I'm going to have for them is perform email triage. This is the number one task that I want them to do.

And I just, I learned what, there's some program. I'm sure I've got it open here. Sane box or Hiver. I think it's Hiver. allows people to access your inbox. Anyway, I'm going to use that. It's going to be nice. Yeah. Gmail, if you have Gmail for business,

Gmail for business also allows other people to access your inbox. Oh, nice. Yeah. And then the other thing, and this is something that we're going to be implementing pretty soon, is I'm going to, again, I'm going to start asking my readers to continue, my new subscribers to answer those two questions. but rather than have them reply to the email and have that go to my inbox, not my literal inbox, but have them come to my email address, rather than that, I'm going to direct them to a page, like a survey monkey page, where they can answer those two questions. Because then they still have a chance to share their story.

I still can get that information. And here's what's really cool. So if you have not the free version, but the paid, like the advanced SurveyMonkey professional version, SurveyMonkey can actually aggregate that data and it can pull out keywords, like certain words, like it can create word clouds, basically. Nice. You know, so if there's some issue that a lot of people are facing, then I can see that in the aggregate because I can see that a person has written, you know, real estate or debt or, or invest.

or budget, like I can see the words that they're using and the issues that they're speaking to through that software. And so that's something that we are, well, I haven't done it yet, but that's actually one of the things that Will is helping me implement right now. Nice. So again, this goes back to you cannot outsource thinking. And like, thinking is the most important thing that has to happen in your business because it took me years to come up with that solution because I was like, Right here, this is the objective. These are the problems that are getting in the way of achieving that objective. Okay, how can I achieve the same objective in a way that circumvents these problems?

And it took me a lot of time and a lot of observation to like think through and experiment and come up with this solution. You know, and that is not something that I can delegate to somebody else. But I can delegate walking the dog, you know. And I can delegate taking the car to the mechanic to get a tune up. Like, that I can delegate so that I can then spend that time figuring out a more effective way to interact with my audience. Ah, you've given me so many good ideas to think about here. And going along with the two recent conferences, I've got a lot of process. Well, that said, J.D., I actually have to wrap up because I'm supposed to start shooting video in 15 minutes.

Aha. Very good. Well, I should go back to all these little niggly chores that I'm taking care of. But the good thing is, I mean, as I do them, it's just totally relieving the pressure on my brain. And I'm actually, because I know we're closing on the storage unit in the condo, I feel like I should move all this crap out of my office and into the dining room. Just put it on the dining room table. But I'm going to be patient and wait. So what are some of the key takeaways that have come out of this private mastermind conversation between myself and JD?

Well, here are a few that stand out to me. Number one, don't dump all of your tasks onto a single to-do list. Instead, as you're listing out the things that you have to do, rank these in order of A, B, C, and D. Prioritize those tasks so that you're not looking at this amorphous blob of shallow work stuff that just has to get done. When you're prioritizing those tasks, focus first on taking care of the things that either have immense magnitude. meaning that the consequence of doing that thing or not doing that thing is huge. Or focus on the tasks that only you can do, your own unique abilities. Do the things that cannot be outsourced first.

And if there is time remaining, then take on the responsibility of some of the things that you could otherwise outsource. So, for example, you cannot outsource exercise. You cannot outsource sleep. You can't outsource calling your mom. So those things have to stay on your list. But there are other things that other people can do. And it's okay to give those tasks to somebody else. It doesn't mean that you're lazy.

It means that you're making efficient use of your time. Another takeaway is not to commingle business building or wealth building tasks with personal tasks. There's a big difference between buying new gym clothes versus doing something that might enable your income to grow by an extra $2,000 a year. Now, both are necessary, but they don't. deserve to be on the same list. So delineate between these. Another takeaway is to build a savings and invest this money into your projects. Remember that most companies are not profitable within their first year, and that's okay. You have to be willing to invest in your project in order to give it a chance to become profitable down the road. And as long as you're okay with the worst case

scenario, you know, so what if the worst case scenario happens? It has to be a chance. It has to be a chance to happens and you move on, that's fine. Don't be too risk averse. Don't be so pennywise risk averse that you miss out on the ability to create something big and produce something of immense value. Another takeaway is to theme your days, meaning that you will do something on Monday, something else on Tuesday, something else on Wednesday. Every day has its own batch process, its own theme. I've also heard this referred to as Elon days because allegedly this is how Elon Musk handles his schedule. He does something on Monday that might be related to Tesla. Tuesday, he might do certain things that are related to SpaceX. Wednesday, maybe Solar City or the Hyperloop.

I mean, he balances a lot of projects. And allegedly, he does this by batching his days, theming his days. Now, if you have a 9 to 5 day job and you're building some type of a side hustle, that's fine. You can still theme your days. Let's say that you work on your side hustle, one hour every evening, theme that hour, do something every Monday, during that hour, something every Tuesday, and so on. The final takeaway that I would leave you with is to impose structures on yourself. Now, examples of these structures could be morning routines, working during specific hours, working in specific physical work spaces, but build these rituals and these structures because those structures can help you become focused and efficient,

but they're not going to be imposed upon you by the outside world. There's no external source that's going to tell you that you have to be at X location at Y time. So your structures must be intrinsic. And that's good news for you because it means that you can design the structure that helps you be your best self. I'd love to know what you thought about this episode. head to podcast.offordanything.com where you can check out the show notes, leave comments, and sign up to be on our mailing list so that you get updates about future episodes. Please also head to iTunes and hit subscribe so that you can get new episodes when they come out.

My name is Paula Pant, host of the Afford Anything podcast. Thank you so much for listening to this private mastermind conversation between myself and J.D. Roth, the founder of Get Rich Slowly and Money Boss. I'll catch you next week. Take care.