Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - The Math That Should Terrify Every Executive

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

72% of your time is being eaten by coordination, communication, and admin. That leaves 28% for actual strategy. That is not a productivity problem. That is a math problem. Most leaders use AI to do their admin faster. They put a turbo engine on a car that is driving in the wrong direction. The win is not doing the 72% faster. The win is deleting it. In this solo episode I break down what "work slop" is, why flow state makes you 500% more productive, and the three questions that decide what you hand to a machine. Then I share how cutting low-value work out of my sales team's day lifted close rates by 10%. I built and sold Rogue Risk on an operational model called the human optimized system. Today we call it easy mode. I have spent 20 years creating online and helping leaders turn chaos into clarity, and I have a book by the same name coming in September 2027. If one idea here lands, run the three-day time audit this week. Then come tell me what you cut. I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley Follow Ryan: Website: https://ryanhanley.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

72% of your time as an executive is being eaten by coordination, communication, and admin. That leaves only 28% for actual strategy work, for vision work. That's not a productivity problem. That's a math problem. And the math is telling you that you're not actually doing your job. If you're new here, my name is Ryan Hanley. I built and sold an insurance company called Rogue Risk. We were acquired specifically for an operational model

that we developed called the human optimized system. Now, the idea is simple. We use technology to eliminate the work that steals humans from their high value output. Let the humans do human things, let the machines do machine things. But that's not the case for a lot of businesses. Now, today we call that easy mode.

I actually have a book coming out by the same title in September of 2027, which I know it was a ways away, but if you wanna follow along with the journey, there's a link, below in the description for you to do that. Now, here's where most people go wrong. Most executives, they hear that stat and they think, well, I need better tools. I need AI to help me move through those 72% tasks faster. And that's just flat wrong. The win here for executives isn't doing the 72% faster. The win is deleting those 72% of admin, communication, and coordination activities from

your daily work completely. And completely may be an unachievable goal, but we want to get that number down as much as possible. So let's talk about what that 72% actually is. It's the meeting that could have been an email. It's the email that should have been a decision. It's the status update, the approval chain, the scheduling back and forth, the report that nobody reads, the Slack thread that went 47 messages deep.

to answer a question that should have already been in your FAQs. This is commonly known as work slop. Workslop is any transactional low value activity that keeps you away from the work only you can do. That's the whole idea of easy mode. What is the thing that you do that looks like cheating to everybody else? And here's the brutal truth about work slop. It doesn't feel like waste.

It feels like work. It feels like activity. It feels like being needed. It feels like achievement. It feels like you're filling your calendar. It gives you that dopamine hit of checking boxes and getting things done, finishing that to-do list. You feel productive.

That's why you sit in the 72%. That's why you allow the 72% of activities that are just coordination communication admin to even exist. But we all know because we feel it at the end of the day, even if we're not conscious about it, we feel at the end of the day we weren't really productive. We were busy, busy for sure. but not productive. And busy is the enemy of great. Now, I'm going to absolutely butcher this guy's name

because it's kind of long in Eastern European and I apologize because I have nothing but respect. There was the Hungarian American psychologist named Mahaley, who was a psychologist who spent more than 40 years studying peak performance. And he found that executives in flowstice, are 500% more productive than their baseline. 500%.

McKinsey confirmed it. They did a 10-year study and got the same exact finding. Most knowledge workers only spend 5% of their working hours in flow state. 5%. That's insane. When we know that when you sit in flow state, you're 500% more productive. So you've got that stat that we started with. 72% of your time is spent in coordination, communication, admin.

And you've got research that says flow, your highest leverage state, your easy mode, is only accessible 5% of the time because you're doing this kind of work. You've got a culture that celebrates the grind of suffering like it's a virtue. And that's the problem, right? We are celebrating grinding when we should be celebrating outcome at. achievement. Grinding alone is not outcome and achievement. And this is why the math just doesn't add up. It's costing you everything. And by everything, I don't just mean success in your business. I mean everything up here, everything right here, your health, your relationships. It's a major

problem. And just sticking your head in the sand or pretending like you haven't made it this far in the video and don't know the stats that I just presented you with is not going to make. make you any happier. It's not going to make you any more successful, satisfied, or fulfilled. Now, where does AI fit into this picture? Because this is where I'm going to say something that's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable and most likely is where I'll get the most pushback in the comments. Most leaders are using AI just to do the 72% faster. That's it. That's what they're doing. They're saying, hey, I got all these tasks I got to do, all this calendar stuff, all these meetings and I'll just use AI to do all the same stuff, just do it faster.

And they're using it to write emails quicker and they're using it to summarize meetings faster and generate reports in seconds instead of minutes. I mean, this is all the propaganda and advertising that you see for all the tools that have AI. And we're calling this transformation. This is not transformation. This is just accelerating the growth of work slop and dissatisfaction with your job. You are now producing low value.

output at machine speed instead of human speed. And you're calling it progress, which it is not. You've put a turbo engine on a car that's driving in the wrong direction. It's insanity. And we're all celebrating it. Like, oh, I can have 15 meetings in a day now instead of five because I have AI. Did you need those meetings? The question has never been, how do I do the 72% faster?

The question is, what happens to my output if the 72% simply didn't. didn't exist. What if every hour you currently spend on coordination, communication, and admin, the work slop activities was redirected to the 28%. Your flow state work, your easy mode work, what if your entire job was what's in that 28% bucket today? That's not a productivity hack. That's a complete redesign of how you work. And this is what AI, and particularly, my My AI Chief of Staff is actually done for me. I use OpenClaw, and I've named my OpenClaw maximum effort. If you get that reference, you're one of us.

Leave it in the comments below if you know what it is. And he's my AI Chief of Staff. And he handles a tremendous amount of things for me. Everything from podcast guest research, outreach, workflows, content distribution, session management, memory across every conversation that we have. We use Obsidian for that. Every project, every decision I've ever made in the last two years. Operational orchestration.

First past correspondence with different guests or people who want to sponsor the show, et cetera. He does meeting prep and has it waiting for me before the meeting. Follow-up sequencing. He tracks and makes sure that I'm getting done any items that I agreed to in different meetings. All of these things that are packaged around my easy mode, my flow state, the things that make me genuinely valuable as a human, as many of them as possible I am passing off to max because those are things that me doing them add zero value.

Not because I'm lazy, but because every hour that I spend doing work slop activities is an hour stolen from my easy mode, from my zone of genius, from my flow, from the things that allow me to produce 10x results, the things that when I do them, they look like cheating to other people. I'm a creator.

When I'm writing, speaking, when I'm building frameworks for clients, when I'm distilling complex ideas into things that people can actually use, like hopefully this video. Time for me simply disappears. I can do this all day. I can produce in three hours

what most people can do in a week. Not because I'm smarter. That's certainly not the case. But because I'm operating where my natural talent is. This is what I love doing. I love reading, consuming content, I love connecting ideas. I love finding new ways of packaging things

that can be valuable to you. That's why I do this show. I love this shit. And it's a skill that I've spent sharpening over 20 years of creating online. That's why this is part of my easy mode. Doing this right here. Easy mode is the zone where your natural talent

creates disproportionate results and looks like cheating to everyone else. The entire job of my AI chief of staff, is to protect my easy mode. So here's how you think about this and what goes into AI versus what stays with the human, in this case me, right? Three questions. The first one, does this require my specific talent, expertise, insights, the thing that I do

that produces outside results? If yes, keep it. Pretty obvious. Two, does this require a human relationship? Trust, judgment, presence, taste, if yes. Keep it. Three, could a well-briefed system do a 70% to 80% adequate job of this? If yes, give it to AI today.

Never look back. The AI doesn't have to do it exactly the way you do it. And it doesn't have to do it exactly as well as you do it. If the AI can get to 80% of the output that you can do at 100% but it's work slop, give it to the AI. Because you're going to get 10x results by spending more time in your year. mode. Most of what lives in that 72% bucket fails questions one and two and passes questions three with flying colors. They're like no doubters. But we continue to do them because we celebrate being busy. Here's what AI chief of staff is not for. It is not for building relationships. That's you.

It is not for solving the complex problems that require your judgment and your taste, your pattern recognition, your intuition, your gut. That's you. That's your job. You need to keep that. AI is not for driving growth in so much as strategy, right? That the vision, the leadership presence, the persuasive capacity that only comes from genuine human engagement. That's you that needs to stay with you. It will always be with you.

Everything else can be outsourced to a machine. It doesn't mean it has to be and it doesn't mean it needs to be done tomorrow. But task by task, workslop activity by work slap activity, those things can be passed off to the machine. In 2020, I launched Rogue Risk seven days before COVID shut down the state of New York. It was freaking brutal. I literally was in business for a week and everything went bye-bye. I had just emptied my retirement account. I had vendors that I owed money to.

I had marketing plans. I had advertising budget. I had everything ready to go. And our entire world was frozen solid. So I had to pivot. I had to make a move out of necessity. And this was the genesis of the human optimized business model. Back then, it was kind of mostly analog and a little digital, right?

Paper time audits, manual workflow analysis, three-day time logs for every person on the team kind of tracking every 15 minutes to find things that we could cut out of their out of their life that was work slot and what I found was that one of my salespeople talented driven capable they were spending a majority of their time on administrative work that had nothing to do with selling in particular finding where to place the business now I know some of you watching this most of you watching this most likely are not in the insurance industry But when you do business with an independent insurance agent, they collect all your information, understand what your problem is and what you're trying to get done, and then they go out to the

market and find the best carrier or a set of carriers for you. It is that process of figuring out which carrier is the best for you that takes a tremendous amount of time. So we needed to eliminate that from our salespeople's lives. So what we did was we created kind of hacked together analog digital tool because AI was not back then what it was today. Frankly, it didn't even exist back then in a commercialized state. And we started creating a simple kind of tumbler system route tree that allowed our agents to rapidly get to the appropriate market in like about 75% of the time.

Sorry, we took about 75% of the time off. It took about 25% of the time that it normally did. And what we saw was our close rates jumped by 10% because we were able to sometimes on the phone with the customer, but mostly it was because the speed at which we were. able to get back to our customers with quotes, we were able to increase our close ratio 10% by removing this work slop from our sales people's lives. And it's something that I would have never known was a problem, or at least as large a problem as it was, if I wasn't doing the time audits. They didn't necessarily become better salespeople, right?

That's training. That's another thing. Not that you shouldn't train to become better salespeople, but simply by removing the work slop, allowing them to work faster in the places that their expertise was and not spend so much time trying to figure out where to place the business, they were closing 10% more business than they were before. Now is 2020 before we ate AI tools that can do that in a finger snap today. I built that model by hand using spreadsheets and macros because that was the technology that

existed back then. But you don't have to do that today. The leaders who figure this out first, who stop using. AI to accelerate the wrong work, work slop, and start using it to eliminate that work entirely and get yourself and your people in their zone of genius more often doing the things that they do best that look like cheating to everyone else. Those are the leaders that are going to win because it's not cheating. They're just doing the math correctly. Here's what I want you to do. And I want you to do it as soon as you possibly can. Now next quarter, not after you finish a book or,

or whatever, do it like ASAP. Step number one, run a three-day time audit. Every activity, every 15 minutes, just write down what you're doing. No editing. What actually happened? What was the activity? And if you want to tag it as what you believe

is kind of easy mode or work slop, that can help too. Step number two, categorize everything, easy mode or work slot, right? Easy mode is the stuff that produces disproportionate, results. Workslop is the draining, nonsensical work that is transactional and really has zero value being done by a human. Step number three, find the single most obvious piece of workslop that could be handed to an AI system and figure out a way to delegate. Hand it to the AI.

Ask your favorite AI, chat GPT, Claude, whatever, Manis. Ask, I need you to. to perform this task for me, how do you recommend we do this? Build a plan with AI and figure out how to automate it, whether it's using an agent or an automation or building an application, if you know how to do that and want to go that deep. But get rid of one activity, one work slop activity, that's it. And then just sit, sit for a week, sit for a couple weeks, a month, and see what it feels like to not have to do that thing anymore.

And how much time you get back in your day to do the actual work that grows your business, that creates satisfaction. telling you it will blow your mind. It's like a crack addiction. You need more. I want to get rid of more of this crap. Because the truth about that 72% is it's never going to disappear on its own and it's only going to grow.

And if you're just making it faster, it's going to grow even faster. It's like feeding plant food to weeds. It compounds. And it fills every hour that you give it. It's insane. The only way to flip that ratio is to make a decision, a real decision. Not a goal, not a wish. make the decision that you are no longer available for work slop that doesn't require you,

the human, that isn't in your easy mode. And activity by activity, get that crap out of your life. Because those activities that sit in the 28% for you today, those are the things that are going to change who you are. They're going to change your life. They're going to change your business. That 28% activity, what's in that 28% bucket today, that's where companies get built. That's where you become a legend.

That's where the version of you that people actually need, the strategist, the visionary, the high output version of you, that's where that version shows up. So stop letting WorkSop steal that because you're better than that. And by embracing this idea of easy mode, you'll become a legend. This is the way, my friends. I love you for being here.

If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button, subscribe if you're not subscribed, tell your friends, put a comment below if you enjoyed or just completely disagree with something I said. I do these videos because I want to add value to you. And if there's something in here that doesn't make sense or something that we can expand upon, please leave it in the comments below.

I love you for being here. I'm out of here. Peace.