You're delegating to your future self

I said yes to three things in about four minutes one Tuesday. Barely thought about any of them. It cost me nothing to say yes, because the guy paying for it wasn't in the room.

Then Thursday showed up and I couldn't stand him.

A guy on my Tuesday call put it better than I ever have:

Any time you put something on the calendar, you're just delegating something to yourself in the future. And if you're not careful, those days come up and you're mad at yourself.

Every yes I hand out on Tuesday is a job I'm assigning to a guy who gets no vote in it. That guy is me on Thursday, already tired, wondering what I was thinking.

Same owner had the other half of it, and this is the part that got me:

The best advice anybody ever gave me about organizing my stuff was to throw most of it away. Any time I feel like I'm being efficient, it's because I've been really guarded about how I give my time away.

Guarded. That was the word I was missing, because I was never guarding anything. I was reading a lie off a screen.

My calendar had work in it. It did not have the drive to the gym, or eating, or getting my daughter where she needs to be, or the standing coffee with the guy down the street I've had every week for years. So I'd open it up, see all that white space, and say yes to something.

The white space was never white. It was already full. I'd just never written it down.

I filled it in honestly one time and saying no got EASY. Not braver, easier. There's no judgment call left in it. I'm just reading a screen that tells me I've got four hours this week, and four hours is four hours.

One of the guys caught himself on that call. He's got 30 minutes between his two morning classes, three or four days a week, and he's been spending it hanging around the gym.

I didn't tell him to stop. Hanging around your own gym isn't a crime and it might honestly be the best part of his day. What I said was that it's a choice, and right now he's making it by accident. If that block was for making three reels every Monday, his whole week of social would be done, and he could go back to hanging around Tuesday with nothing nagging at him.

Somebody else in the room doesn't clean her house, cook her own food, or do her own laundry. Pays for all three, feels great about it, and I think she's right.

I'll say the condition on that out loud because I've been on the wrong side of it in both directions. I've paid to get time back and then let it evaporate on nothing I could name afterward. I've also refused to pay for it and told myself that was discipline, when it was just cheap. Buying your time back only counts if you actually use the time. Rest with it, earn with it, get better at something with it. Sitting on the couch is a completely fine use of it, by the way. Just be honest that it's the trade, because you still have to go make the money that pays for it.

And the rule that makes any of this survivable, from another owner on the call: if somebody can do it 80 percent as well as you, that's 100 percent good enough.

I still overcommit. Less than I did. The difference now is I can watch myself doing it, which mostly means Thursday and I are on better terms.

Nick

Nick Habich owns Shark Bite Fitness in Cape Coral, Florida, and coaches gym owners in Pathfinder Collective. These notes go out to his email list on Tuesdays and Thursdays.