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Chapter 1: What percentage of executive time is wasted on coordination and admin?
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 is a ways away. But if you want to 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.
Work slop is any transactional low value activity that keeps you away from the work only you can do, right? 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. 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 Mihaly Mihaly.
who was a psychologist who spent more than 40 years studying peak performance. And he found that executives in flow states 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.
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Chapter 2: What is 'work slop' and how does it affect productivity?
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 easy 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, work-slap 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 life that was work slop. 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 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.
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Chapter 3: How can achieving a flow state improve executive productivity?
Step number three, find the single most obvious piece of work slop that could be handed to an AI system and figure out a way to delegate it. Hand it to the AI. Ask your favorite AI, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever, Manis. Ask, I need you 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 work stop. 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.
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I love you for being here. I'm out of here. Peace.
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