The Math That Should Terrify Every Executive
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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. 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 and 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.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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