Andrew:	This course is about focusing on less so you can have more impact. It's led by Ari Mizelle, a serial entrepreneur, author and achievement architect. I'm Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, where proven founders teach. Ari, can you tell our audience what life was like before you did what you're about to teach us here today?

Ari:	Sure. I had, when I was 20 years old I got involved in a real estate project in upstate New York. I bought these eight old buildings with a dream of turning them into lofts. And basically I didn't know anything about real estate or construction. The deal was that anybody that worked on the job had to teach me their trade. So I spent the next two years, 18 - 20 hours a day learning and doing every construction trade imaginable. 

I was basically burning the candle at both ends and the middle and running the business, learning construction, doing the construction. At the end of three years I was about as burned out as I could possibly be. And basically got really sick. A couple of years later I got diagnosed with Crohn's disease which is an incurable, chronic inflammation of the digestive tract. And I was on death's door pretty much, taking 16 pills a day and just overwhelmed by stress and work and $3 million of debt when I was 23 years old.

Andrew:	Wow.

Ari:	It was a weird place to be.

Andrew:	Wow, and it's one of those situations where you're already working 20 hours a day. How many more hours can you possibly find to add to the business so that you can try to get yourself out? At that point you can't add anymore. You've got to focus on doing less and doing more of the right things. Where were you after you did what you are about to teach us?

Ari:	So, I mean, after a lot of self-analysis and experimentation I was actually able to overcome this incurable disease and (?) in France, which was an unbelievably amazing experience. It's something I never could have hoped to do. In addition to that I am a green building consultant. I've become an expert in that field. I'm an author of a book on that subject. A real estate developer, a real estate broker. I've been an advisor with several start ups since then. I have this (?) and my consulting and coaching company where I do (?) protection. And I'm going to be a Dad in about three weeks.

Andrew:	Congratulations. And I see you actually here coming across on the finish line at the Ironman. The Ironman of course most people wish that at some point in their lives they'll get to do a marathon. The Ironman has a marathon length run but before you even get to that you've got to do essentially a marathon length swim and a bike ride that's over a hundred miles which is like the marathon equivalent for cycling. And then you finally get to the marathon. So you were really able to get in shape and to achieve a lot both professionally and personally and I want to know how you did it. I want to know how my audience can do it. What's the first step and how does this first tab up here, e-lance fit into it. What's that first step?

Ari:	Well, the one thing I want to tell people to (?) is that the framework that I've developed is optimized, automated, outsourced. And that is how I attack every problem, every issue in that order. So first we have to optimize as much as possible, realize what the problem is, get down to its barest minimum then automate as much as possible, maybe all of it, and whatever is left outsource to another person who may be better at it or cheaper so that you can focus on what you need to. The goal of everything that I do now and everything that I've been doing for over a year now, is to free up that extra hour or that minute or even a second of my time so that I can free up my mind and use it for what I want.

So, basically Elance and a lot of people are probably familiar with it, but e-lance is like the worlds largest (?) for outsourced talent. You can pretty much post on any job that you want to be done, something that can be done remotely. So anything from graphic design, web development, programming, virtual assistance, you name it. So I knew about it but I wasn't really into it at the time, and I had created this green building company and green consulting. And the lead certification process which is the number one green (?) system is very contrived in the way that it's (?). It's all, there's like 500 pages of pds (?) that you basically have to fill out and operate. 

And the truth is that green building is an art in a way and there's a lot of very high level stuff to figure out. Unfortunately you get bogged down by a lot of really badly planned minutiae. And filling out an online pds on a system that works on one version of Safari and not another version of, it's archaic. So I took a shot with e-lance and I've tried to find an architect that knew me and could work the way that I work and get a lot of my (?). 

And I found a guy who was amazing. He lives in Minneapolis and he's been working for me for two years now and he's the backbone of my business. And I've also hired on an engineer, these two people are not full-time. They're amazing at what they do and it's, the economies of scale work out. So that I can basically run a one man shop but I have a full team supporting me. And it essentially enables me to spend about two hours a week on my green consulting business dealing with the really high level strategic planning issues that only I can deal with.

Andrew:	So I've actually heard of course of hiring developers on e-lands. I've heard people say that they've hired virtual assistants on e-lands. But to find an architect is surprising. I actually even heard, I'm hearing more and more that people are taking higher level jobs and passing them on to outsourcers through e-lands, including things like writing to reporters, creating press releases. All right, so one of the things that you do is you look for jobs that you can pass on to other people. You go to e-lands, you find somehow who can handle that job, you pass it on to them. What else.

Ari:	Well, so really the first, before you do anything is kind of get that 80/20 rule. That we, I'm sure a lot of people know about it. But essentially you know 80 percent of your benefits come from 20 percent of your inputs kind of thing. So really analyzing where you're spending your time, how you're spending your time, what you're doing with that time and what are you really getting out of it? So we know where to zero in and focus our efforts. In my case 80 percent of my time is being spent filling out PDFs that somebody else can do faster and better than me because he's got expertise and I don't do that. For several clients and get into sort of a group. Whereas I need to focus my time on that 20 percent that we deal with the clients, figuring out the overall strategy (?) that we've been (?).

Andrew:	Okay. All right. And I've got to say, that that's something that was hard for me to do even here. For a long time I was editing my own interviews, I was editing my own courses. I was not transcribing the work myself but then I would go and collect the transcription after it was done from the course of the interview, and then post it up on the website myself. And then I realized, like you're saying, so much of this work can be outsourced and it's so easy to do it with sites like e-lance. Alright, let's talk about this next tab that we've got to show the audience. What is the next step and then how does this next secret tab right here, not so secret tab, factor in?

Ari:	The next step is one of my personal favorites which is what I call creating an external brain. 

Andrew:	Okay.

Ari:	So we are not very good at multitasking. Even if you think you're good at multitasking, you're not, I'm not. It's just not the way that our minds are evolved. And the truth is that keeping ten tabs open on chrome, that's not multitasking. And eating while talking on the phone is not multitasking. There's very few true example of real multitasking in modern society and the only one that I can ever think of is a commercial pilot who is paying attention to eight instruments, talking to his co-pilot, navigating, talking on the radio and (?). But for the majority of us when we're trying to divide our time, we also divide our quality. That's just the way it is. We have a limited amount of resources that we can use at any given time. And as a matter of fact, as everyone knows, I'm sure from high school and from movies like we only use five percent of our brains anyway. 

So, when this really struck me was that when I was in high school, like every week I'd probably come up with a new business idea. And I have a notebook about that phase from high school that has probably just hundreds of business ideas in it. 99 percent of them are crap but I have these ideas. And then when I got to college and after college I was really, I was noticing that these ideas weren't coming anymore. And I kind of just accepted it and figured maybe I'm just getting older and my imagination is not what it was. So when I started doing (?), I started to get those ideas back. It felt like my brain was being reawakened. 

The idea of creating the external brain is to offload your thoughts and your encounters as much as possible. Essentially we're talking about note taking, something that I historically was very bad at. But something like Evernote, which is what we're talking about here, works on every platform and it syncs between your iPhone, Blackberry, anything. Basically you can keep notes as URLs, sound bites, videos, photos, articles, anything. You name it, you bunch it together. 

What I find is no matter what it is, get that idea out of your head so that you can be thinking about something more actively. What happens is a week later you happen to be looking in your Evernote and you see scraps of this and scraps of that and a really good idea comes together. Evernote is taking it even a step further now, they just came out with two apps yesterday. One called Food and one called Below. Below is basically about remembering everybody you meet by picture, by context, and by geographical location. It's really incredible. It's just feeding the idea that we don't need to be the database for a lot of the things that we need to know about to interact. 

Andrew:	Yeah. Is that your dog, by the way, in the background?

Ari:	Sorry, is it loud?

Andrew:	No, it's just part of the experience. What kind of dog do you have?

Ari:	I have a Jack Russell and a Boston Terrier and my parents' Miniature Dachshund is here. 

Andrew:	Cool. I have a Jack Russell mix. I wanted to get a Boston Terrier because they're great dogs but they were hard to find. At least, when I was looking.

Here, look. I'll show the audience this, too. I use Evernote for everything. It helps so much. I keep a checklist for doing these courses. I hope there's nothing embarrassing here. No, there isn't. It's things like is there enough hard drive space to record this course? This is a fat mamba-jamba file that's going to come out of the end of this course. I want to make sure I have room on my hard drive. Am I recording it on Screenflow? I once recorded using the wrong mic. To keep from forgetting, I have a little checklist that includes record with the right mic. Make sure I'm recording the computer audio so I make sure I get your stuff in there, too. Every step.

Ari:	I like it. It's got caffeine on it, I like that.

Andrew:	Yeah, actually I don't mean. It would be cool if I meant just caffeine on in here. Caffeine is the program that I use on the Mac that would keep my screen from dimming so that the audience doesn't have to look at a dim screen because Mac auto-dims the screen. 

It's all these little things that I keep here and now, even though things go wrong in the interviews, I don't sweat it because I know exactly what needs to get done. Here, I should be checking that one off. I just get it done before the interview. It's a huge time saver. I know you're going to show us Google Docs but I personally prefer Evernote because there's so many ways to get notes in there. If I come up with an idea I just quickly email it myself and it goes into Evernote. If I want to share a set of ideas with someone else who I work with or with an outsourcer I could share them easily. It's terrific. If I want to give this checklist to someone else who will one day lead these courses they will know exactly what needs to get done. Yes, we did talk about shutting off all other applications.

Ari:	Yeah, so I love Evernote for the majority of that stuff. What I like Google Docs for is really for collaborative stuff. If you're like in a team and you're doing a group brain dump it's really good for that collaborative aspect. Cloud storage in general is one of my (?). I have 12 in-drop boxes, all on this computer, and that's it. I refuse to have anything else consolidated on my computer. Essentially if my computer blew up I could be up and running on another computer in about three minutes. I'm as much web-based as I can possibly be.

Andrew:	OK. Next.

Ari:	Right, this is another one that is really fun that we kind of came up with, which is choose your own work week. This is not the four hour work week. This is something completely different. Basically my work week, and I feel like I'm going to scuttle myself by explaining this, but my work week is Tuesday-Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. That is by no means the only time that I am doing work because I do work seven days a week, at 2:00 in the morning because I love what I do and I'm always wanting to work on different things. My work week is the time that people that I do business with can reasonably expect to interact with me. Either by email, phone, or in meetings. That enables me to have a legitimate four day week every week. I grouped together my business activity so that I can get into business mode. One of the things that people who work from home and entrepreneurs and not corporate people find very difficult is to be in work mode while not being in a work environment. It's not that work-life balance, it's the work-life separation.

To do that, I use several different tools to keep people basically within that parameter, but one of the best ones is Tungle. What Tungle does is it syncs with your schedule in real time, and it gives you this public URL that people can go to, and they can see available times that they can suggest a meeting with you, so it's like office hours. You don't have to register to choose a meeting with me. I keep this in my e-mail signature (?), and I think the average number of e-mails to set a meeting is seven. So, we have to figure out a time, a place and a different time of (?).

All I do now, and people love it. I just say, hey, here's my schedule. Take any time that works for you. It makes it flexible for them even though it's flexible within my parameters. As you can see, it's only showing you availability between Tuesday and Thursday and for the majority of people I interact with, they'll just assume that I'm really busy on Friday and Monday. 

It's particularly good if you need a schedule, like several meetings or interviews all at a row, but getting things into more of a compartment, basically. That's why this actually applies to people who work at home or who work in a corporate environment. You can choose those times when you're going to do certain activities. I only do sales meetings in the mornings, for instance or I'm only going to be dealing with e-mails or (?), or I'll only do overseas calls at this time, but get them all broken down in one place. Your head gets in there and you get in a routine, the efficiencies just come out of it naturally. 

Andrew:	I don't use Tungle, I use Google Calendar which has now a new way of letting people book times with you based on your availability, but the same rule applies. It's a huge time saver for me. I actually don't make myself available as much as you do. For me, it's Thursdays in the afternoons, a big block of time. I do a set of 15 minute super focused phone calls, and it helps a lot. I've learned that by doing these courses.

What's the next big tip that we're going to give the audience?

Ari:	The next big thing is customization. 

Andrew:	OK.

Ari:	You don't have to accept that the mass produced product isn't necessarily the best product for you, and this goes from anything from food to vitamins to clothing to software. I use a company called VitaminsOnDemand who make a customized supplement pack that I take every day with the vitamins that I want. It has to do with the experimentation that I went through with my Crohn's disease, and I could never find the perfect mix. So, there does exist a site that . . .

Andrew:	There is a place out there that will customize vitamins for you?

Ari:	VitaminsOnDemand.com.

Andrew:	Wow. All right. I didn't know that.

Ari:	That's just it. Your reaction is what I'm teaching people. When you have a problem, a solution probably exists and if it doesn't, you can make one, and this is how. Software is one that makes a lot of sense to people, and the story that I like to tell is I used to use a service called Rentomatic.com which is just for tracking rental checks because I had these different rental properties. It was great. If the tenant was late, I would e-mail them. It was really good, and it was free, and then they started doing, well, they started charging like $50 a month. I didn't think it was worth it for what I was doing. I only had eight properties.

So, I went on Elance, and it was like a full disclaimer here. I didn't make any money off of this, but I went to Elance and I basically said, "I need a copy of this site for my own uses." For $115 somebody, a programmer in the Ukraine, made me an exact copy of Rentomatic's system, basically with some customizations for me and none of the extra stuff I didn't want. That's why it's been over a year.

Andrew:	Is that what this is right here, Virtual Post Mail?

Ari:	This goes a little further. Basically, (?) now I just use Virtual Post Mail which is like virtual class mail. It lets you get your postal mail visually, and they have a check cashing, a check deposit service. Now, all my rent checks go to Virtual Post Mail, and I have a virtual assistant check on the 10th of the month to see what came in and what didn't.

Andrew:	I see. 

Ari:	And then, Virtual Post Mail deposits all the checks for me. It's an automation that did not exist before.

Andrew:	I see. Let me ask you something. I understand Rentomatic and how effective it is and it's a disappointment when the price goes up. If you're a guy who likes to focus does it make sense to go and hire someone else to create a version of it instead of saying hey, I'll pay a little bit more so that I can focus on the few things that I do really well instead of becoming a project manager for new software?

Ari:	Well, that's the thing. With something like this and with Elance, I don't have to be project manager. I put up the post, people bid on it, I say yes and four days later I have a working product. The point of it is, well, I say exact copy but the product I got didn't have any of the frills. It didn't have any of the extra stuff that I didn't want and it had two or three features that I would want that were not in the real original product. I got it tweaked to what I want it to be and then instead of paying $50 a month for a year or two, I got it for $115 once.

Andrew:	I see. OK, so the big point that you're saying is you don't have to accept...

Ari:	(?) Sorry, even further to that, which is a really cool story, is that I switched to a Mac about a year and a half ago. I wish I had done it years ago. I got the new Mac Mini. There were no wall mounts available for it, at the time when it came out, for some reason. I wanted a wall mount. I had a design in mind. I am not a drafter, by any means, so I drew a really bad drawing of what I thought would be a cool wall mount. I put it on Elance and said I need a technical drafter to make this into an actual product drawing. For $30 someone made it into a really beautiful drawing that looked like an architectural plan. 

Then I went to Shapeways.com which does on-demand fabrication of products for you out of glass, wood, metal, plastic, whatever you want. I got this mount made for me for like another $30. For $60 I had a custom made Mac Mini mount that I had designed myself with no experience at all. The whole thing took me about 10 minutes of my time. Then Shapeways has its own ecommerce platform so I immediately turned around and sold my newly designed product and I sold eight of them.

Andrew:	I see.

Ari:	It actually, I could have made that into a business if I wanted to. It was really fun. The solution did not exist, I figured out how to create it.

Andrew:	I see. That is the big take away. The big take away is you don't have to accept what's out there. There are now tools online that will enable you to create what you want. Often it's cheaper than using the tools that are out there that don't really fit you. In your case Rentomatic didn't really fit you. For less money you were able to create your own product. Then you moved on to virtual post mail, which is what we have here.

You talked about Shapeways.com as the site that you used to manufacture the idea that you had. What was the site that you used to get the design?

Ari:	Elance.

Andrew:	Oh, so you went to Elance and said this is what I have in mind, design it for me and then you took that to Shapeways. Let me bring up Shapeways. Shapeways.com, let's bring that sucker up. I see. I didn't even know this site exists. 

Ari:	It's so cool, you can get things made out of plastic, or glass, or rubber, or metal, or wood. It's very, very cool. It's basically free printing is what they do. That makes it so they can do things on demand, one off, really cheaply. It's really good for prototyping. I don't know the first thing about prototyping but I got this done with very little time and effort.

Andrew:	All right. What's the next big idea?

Ari:	Stop running errands. Nobody should be running errands, ever. I've met one person in my life that said that she enjoyed running errands. I was just dumbfounded. I didn't have any (?). In general, errands are a waste of time. They're not efficient. The stores are busy. You always forget something that you need to get. You never get enough. It's a bad process. 

The very first thing is Amazon Subscribe and Save. Basically, any product that's a non-perishable household good you can do Subscribe and Save on Amazon and you get a 15% across the board discount. You choose how many units you want every month, every two months, whatever it might be. You can cancel at any time. You can get an extra shipment at any time. It's amazing. Basically in the last two years my wife and I have not had to shop for toilet paper, paper towels, laundry detergent, dishwashing detergent, toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo, dog food. The list goes on. It's cheaper. It's automatic. You can get things on a schedule that you might not remember, like the fact that you're supposed to change your toothbrush every three months, so every three months we get new toothbrushes from Amazon and, I can't even, it's probably saved us days of time that we might have otherwise wasted.

Andrew:	Oh, I'm loving it.

Ari:	But the thing with stopping running errands is...(?)

Andrew:	Sorry, wait, the connection...

Ari:	(?)

Andrew:	Sorry, can you start that thought again? I just missed it.

Ari:	Oh, well, basically there's things that you can completely get done for you and then there's things that you can have people help you get done. So in addition to Amazon's Subscribe and Save, which is mostly non-perishables, there's - in New York, at least - or the tri-state area, there's Freshdirect.com for groceries, and I think out by you there's coupon day?

Andrew:	Yep. 

Ari:	...there's definitely grocery delivery resources in most, yeah, so most major cities have grocery delivery service. I happen to like shopping for groceries with my wife, but especially now with the baby coming and stuff, it's definitely convenient to just pull it up on your iPhone app, pick the things you want, and the next day it's there and the quality's great. 

But then the next task, the next thing is TaskRabbit. TaskRabbit is big on the tech crunch scene, but basically they have a group of doers that will get things done. So whereas Elance is for outsourcing every remote task, TaskRabbit is for getting things done that need to happen on-site. You can get somebody...what's nice about TaskRabbit is they're people with actual skills, so you can have them not only go to IKEA and pick up a dresser for you, but you have them bring it over and actually put it together. 

I taught one of my skill circle classes last night about [??] and I had a TaskRabbit named Ryan come and sit in and take...skilled to take class notes for me for the entire hour of the class. Basically, I mean, you can have them write thank you cards, you can have them help you with laundry, cleaning, whatever it might be. Same thing as Elance - you post up a task, people bid on it, and then you pick a person on there and get it done.

Andrew:	All right. You know what I haven't tried yet, is to have someone from TaskRabbit go to Trader Joe's for me. I love the food there, but I hate the long line here; it literally will wrap around the store. Can't stand it. I sometimes calculate in my head how much money I could be making if I sat at my desk instead of sitting, or standing in line at Trader Joe's and it drives me frickin' nuts. But for some reason I just haven't thought to try TaskRabbit for it. 

Ari:	Yeah, I've had them go to Trader Joe's (?) and been very happy with that-

Andrew:	Really?

Ari:	-not to stand in the line, because in New York, too…

Andrew:	The thing about-

Ari:	…it wraps around the store three times.

Andrew:	The thing about grocery shopping and one of the reasons why I hesitated with it is that they'd have to trust me to pay them, what do I pay, 200 bucks for groceries? So do I front them the money or do they trust that I'll pay them? 

Ari:	No, well TaskRabbit...the service has your credit card, so, you know, you're pre-authorizing things and then, you know, the money, it's like escrow, basically.

Andrew:	All right, so they can be sure they get their money without me having to trust them with it.

Ari:...yeah.

Andrew:	All right. Apparently I've got trust issues, and we're ready to go on to the- oh, by the way, look, I'm loving getting Amazon, getting food from Amazon. In my office, I used to go to the kitchen over here where they have all kinds of junk food. Now I go to Amazon...it's kind of, we're getting sidetracked, but I love this! I just get to eat dry fruit, which, for me, is wonderful, it's a great snack. I'm trying to run another marathon and I need to get in shape, and this helps me. Instead of eating junk food, I eat this when I get hungry. 

Ari:	You should try Raw Revolution 100 Calorie Raw Bars that Amazon has, they're amazing.

Andrew:	All right. I'm writing that down. I need to get in shape like you.

Ari:	Yeah. [chuckles]

Andrew:	All right, Raw Revolution is written down...what's the next step, and how does this site fit in? I'll hide it for a moment.

Ari:	So the next one is to put your finances on auto-pilot. I'm sure that lots of people read about this. Again, though, this all kind of hearkens back to self-analysis and figuring out where you're spending your money. It's not- it's more about figuring out where the money's going and just by that awareness you can find efficiencies and savings. So Mint, you know, is the gold standard for kind of managing all of your accounts and seeing how much you're spending on shopping and how much you're spending on utilities or whatever it might be. Also, if you could pull up OneReceipt.com?

Andrew:	Mm-hmm.

Ari:	Which is a service that I just found out about a week ago, and I'm already hooked on it and love it. I met with Michael, one of the (?). Basically one receipt takes, it pulls in all of your e-receipts for an e-mail and you can mail in receipts or you can e-mail in receipts, take pictures with your phone. What it does that the other services don't do is it doesn't just say, here's the (?) receipt, here's the data. It actually breaks down the receipt and gives you each product that was in the receipt, itemized. So for someone like me who spends a (?) spends 28 percent of their monthly income on Amazon, it's nice to actually see one receipt giving the breakdown of the seventy five items that I got from Amazon this month.

Andrew:	So with this, I would just forward my Amazon receipts into on receipt, one receipt would organize it, and if I had a paper receipt take a picture of it and one receipt organizes for me too?

Ari:	You don't even actually have to forward it. It will pull all of the receipts out of your e-mail automatically.

Andrew:	Okay. Alright, and what do you automate? I understand automating with...

Ari:	Once you figure out that (?) a sense of where you're spending your money and you know, oh I don't need to be paying that much for my cable bill, or (?). Sorry, that's the next phase which is bill strength. So bill strength sort of does the analysis for you and it will look at your TV and cable or TV and internet, cell phone bill, gas, credit card, things like that. And based on their actual usage and where you spend your money will recommend products that will save you money and will tell you how much. 

And it's really valuable information like for one (?) service you'd think that they might recommend you change services, which is a hassle in itself. But no it told me that you have a 900 minute per month plan and you're only using 480 minutes. And you really should switch to the 600 minute plan and save, you know, 800 dollars this year. I mean, use that site for like five minutes and you could save like hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

Andrew:	All right. Let's keep it moving. What's the next one?

Ari:	So the next one is, it sounds like a broad topic but just organization. And my, for me I look at it kind of backwards. Organization is not the framework. The framework is what will kind of get you to the organization. Organization for me is more of a benchmark. So all it is, all you have to do is set limits. Upper limits and lower limits. And use those to just kind of give yourself a checks and balance of where you're out and maybe if you need to change things. 

So the example that I always tell people is when I moved a couple of years ago I had an entire closet full of electronic debris, for a better word. You know, cables and old keyboards and computer webcams. And I was like, this is ridiculous, I don't need any of this stuff. So I limited myself to an egg crate, a box like this. And it's full and it's in the bottom of my closet now, and I probably still don't need what's in there, but it's a manageable size. And if anything ever has, if I want to put something in there, two things have to come out. 

So one in, two out policy, which I apply to all storage situations. I will never have more than ten e-mails in my inbox. My iPhone. I have 112 apps on my iPhone, but I will never go past one screen. I have a lot of folders. If I ever want to put something else in the food folder and it's full I've got to take something out. And all of those (?) of apps that I haven't used in months. So it's a self-cleaning self-efficiency policy that just works very well. 

I mean if you are constantly missing those limits, it doesn't mean that you have to punish yourself. It just means that something in your system needs to change.

Andrew:	All right, so you set floors and ceilings on the work on what you allow yourself to keep. All right. How does this site...

Ari:	Well I mean, anything. In the amounts of working out, in the amounts of reading every night. Whatever it might be. Setting those limits. And then this is, so other inbox which you've just pulled up. For that, this is what I always recommend. To the person who has 1400 e-mails in their inbox, like my mother, for instance. It wouldn't be worth anybody's time to kind of go through that, explain and set up all sorts of (?). Just use otherinbox.com which will automatically categorize your e-mails very intelligently. And you can take a 1400 e-mail box down to like 20 in about 15 seconds.

Andrew:	So it will go in my in-box. I guess I give it access to my google.apps account or my other e-mail. It will go in and it will organize it for me and tell me how many invitations I have from sites like Evite and Facebook, how many receipts I have in my in-box and so on. And then I could mark a bunch of them as read without having to get involved with all of the different receipts that have to be taking up time.

Ari:	Right, it will also help you unsubscribe from unwanted emails. It will organize tracking numbers from Amazon or UPS and it will put the delivery date of the package into your Google calendar. It's an amazing thing, an amazing program. It's great.

Andrew:	OK, does it help you deal with all of the email that you're getting from friends or from strangers who are looking for help with something or were just trying to reach out?

Ari:	Yeah, I don't use (?) because I have my own different system put in place. This is what I do for the person who's hopeless, drowning in their inbox. My system is very simple. I have one folder called optional. All the newsletters, deal sites, Facebook notifications, LinkedIn, whatever it may be, that all goes in the optional folder. The point is there's probably things in there that I might enjoy reading but none of it is important. If I go away for a week and I don't check my email and I come back and there's 500 emails in the optional folder I know with complete confidence if I click mark all read I'm not missing anything.

Andrew:	OK.

Ari:	(?)

Andrew:	All right. What's next? We kind of talked about matching calendar items. Maybe, we can skip past that to the next item.

Ari:	Sure. The last thing is really wellness. It's the mind-body connection. I don't think you can enjoy your life without being healthy. In my coaching work, I work with a lot of different individuals, and I set very specific goals for specific needs. Whether it's weight loss or they're concerned about heart health, or whatever it may be. 

I have two recommendations that I feel very comfortable making to the general public as far as fitness and nutrition. The fitness one is Crossfit. I don't know if you've ever tried, have you ever tried Crossfit, Andrew?

Andrew:	I haven't but I've heard so much about them that people have told me that I need to get the founder on to do an interview. He and I have been talking, actually, he and his assistant and I have been talking about having him on. I've heard that it's really impactful. What has it done for you?

Ari:	OK, first of all I was really skeptical but I wanted to try Crossfit when I came back from Ironman. Crossfit is basically, it's a mixture of body weight motions, elliptic lifting, power lifting, calisthenics, plyometrics, high intensity training. Most workouts are between 10 and 20 minutes but they'll leave you absolutely destroyed. What happened was, I did the Ironman and I felt like I was superman but the truth was that I was actually very functionally weak. You train your body to be this lean, mean biking, swimming, running machine and then when you go to pick up...

Andrew:	You lost connection there. What you were saying is you go to pick up groceries and you hurt your back. 

Ari:	Yeah. I played golf with my dad a month before the Ironman and my back hurt for three days. I'm 29 years old, it's ridiculous. I tried Crossfit. The idea behind Crossfit is basically to be fit for life. The reason I can recommend it to anybody is that it is universally scaleable. Every workout is scaleable from a five year old to a 70 year old, literally. They can do the same workout, just maybe different weights or different heights of a box or whatever it may be.

When I got back from Ironman and I started Crossfit my maximum deadlift, which is basically just lifting the bar bell from the ground up to your knees, the heaviest lift that people can do. My maximum deadlift was 95 pounds. That might seem arbitrary to most people, what that literally means is that if my pregnant wife fell on the ground I could not pick her up. After a month of doing Crossfit my max deadlift was 350 pounds. My body morphology changed quite a bit. I feel like I'm a much more stable person. And, because there is such a high intensity cardio component to it, I ran my first sub-six minute mile, ever. And I'd been training for the Ironman for a year.

Andrew:	Sub-six minute mile? Wow.

Ari:	5:46. (?) more injury proof than I ever have and I just can't strongly recommend it enough to people. The other thing is there's a big community aspect to it who does the same workout every day, or they change the work out every day. Everyone is doing the same work out together. A lot of it is done for time, so you can always improve and it's really something special. You can see examples of it there because they post all work outs for free. Each affiliate has its own website. And then, as far as nutrition goes . . .

Andrew:	Wait. So, you're saying there's a website where people can come on and get the training that they want. Where would I go to do that, or where would the audience go and do that?

Ari:	Right there, you're looking at it right there. 

Andrew:	So, they're saying, today we need to do five rounds, do 400 meters, 10 burpee box jumps, whatever that is, 95 pound sumo dead lift, et cetera. 

Ari:	Yeah, but go down to the next one and what it says.

Andrew:	OK. I see back squat. Actually, is it just back squats? 

Ari:	Yeah. That day it was back squats, but basically you do the three reps and then you add some (?) and then you do three reps, and that's the work out for that day. It's very well rounded, and it's . . . For a 70-year-old they might do 45 pounds and then 50 pounds, and then a 24-year-old guy might do 300 pounds, who knows? But they're doing the same motions, and they're working together on this stuff. And also, it's amazing. 

As far as nutrition goes, the best kind of well rounded, easiest diet that I can recommend to people is (?) which was made very popular by Graham Hill of Treehugger. Essentially, it says on five days you don't eat anything with a face.

Andrew:	Sorry. It says what?

Ari:	Five days a week don't eat anything with a face, and then the other two days you can kind of go wild. And then, I would also add cut out sugar as much as possible. The best thing about it is you can start today, it's not an enormous lifestyle change. It is healthier. There's no (?) It's definitely healthier for you. You'll live longer. You'll feel better. You'll feel lighter. Your skin will be better, also, which makes you probably sleep better. It's better for the environment because you're cutting out 70% of your meat consumption which is really water intensive and cheaper. You know, meat tends to be expensive. We did a test, and it's the best all around diet that I can recommend to people. 

Andrew:	All right. Of course, actually, you tell me. The setting of a goal, like running a marathon or running an Ironman, does that help you get running more and help you stay in shape?

Ari:	That's a really good question. A lot of people have to be goal oriented to stick to something. For me, that was really important. Most people are really bad at setting up goals, and I would say that saying I want to run an Ironman, if you're not a runner, for instance or say you're like a 10K or even a 5K runner, saying you're going to run a marathon is not a reasonable goal. Not meaning that you can't set that as a goal, but that's not the goal you should have. The goal you should have is to run a 10K, and then the goal should be to run a 20K. You have to take it step-by-step. 

Seal Fit, which is the Navy Seal version, cross fit, they have their hell week, where it's literally a week of hell, that's working non-stop, and then they always say . . . a lot of these guys come in to hell week, and their goal is to make it to Friday. That will get you killed. Your goal should be to make it to sunrise.

Andrew:	Make it to where? Make it to sunrise.

Ari:	To sunrise.

Andrew:	I see. So, go one step at a time. 

Ari:	Exactly.

Andrew:	Don't aim for a marathon if you've never run before, aim for a 5K, and then move up to a 10K, then a half marathon, et cetera. But having those goals, I know it helps me. What about you? 

Ari:	Absolutely.

Andrew:	Having that marathon or having those goals, that's the only thing that gets me going.

Ari:	A hundred percent. There has to be an end in sight, kind of, for a lot of this stuff. Especially since I like to say (?) I need to . . . there has to be the next thing. I'm not going to do Ironmans forever. There's got to be something else, so there has to be a natural finish.

Andrew:	All right. Ari Mizelle, thanks for . . . actually, let me ask you this one last question. What's the single best thing people can do to get themselves organized and focused? What's the big life happening?

Ari:	The single best . . . well, get a virtual assistant.

Andrew:	A virtual assistant . . .

Ari:	Yeah, and I absolutely mean that for anybody. Whether you're a student or a stay at home mom, or a corporate person or an entrepreneur. Not only having someone to help you out with tasks, like a virtual assistant, but working with a virtual task, a virtual assistant. Having to explain the task the task that you want done is an exercise in itself that will make you more efficient. And it will let you practice delegating and outsourcing and focusing on the things that are more important to you.

Andrew:	All right. Where do you get your personal assistant?

Ari:	So, I actually have a brand new service that I would recommend that is, they're kind of in beta this week and I think that they're going to go totally live next week. It's called outsource.everything.co. 

Andrew:	Let's go to that.

Ari:	And I've tested, and it's amazing actually. The site is so like clean and not advertising. The reason is that these guys are so high level with their assistants. It's just mind boggling how good they are.

Andrew:	Yeah, this site looks a little too basic. It almost looks like. This site looks a little too basic. They're using Weebly, they are, not much going on here. But you're saying the service is good.

Ari:	I'm saying that the service is the best. These guys offer assistants like I've never seen before. And I have a very weird, very stringent test that I put virtual systems through. And this is the only company out of twenty that was ever able to pass that test. So I don't know when this interview's going to come out but they probably will be live by then. And they're just, I actually kind of love how basic their site is because their service is what speaks for itself.

Andrew:	Alright, and I see the prices right here up on the screen. $14.75 an hour down to $13.38 an hour, depending on how many you get, how many hours you want. All right. 

Ari:	They're $12.38 an hour.

Andrew:	Did I say that wrong? $12.38 an hour or $14.75 an hour. What kinds of tasks do you give your personal assistant?

Ari:	Everything from research stuff to calling for making appointments sometimes. This past week my brother in law and sister in law are going to be visiting us in a month and they have a one year old. And they need a car service from the airport that has car seats. So I had the assistant call and find somethings that offer that. I've had them do lead generation stuff for me, data entry with Excel. I mean, everything actually. I really, I'm dependent in a lot of ways. But at the same time the way that my tasks are set up they're really replicable to number of assistants. So if I had to start up with another assistant, the learning curve would be about 5 minutes.

Andrew:	All right. Well thank you for doing this session. I'm looking forward to people giving me their feedback on it. And of course, if you've got anything of value I hope you go to AriMizelle.com, there it is up on the screen. And thank him. Actually where's the contact, there is it right here, e-mail address. Well, thanks for leading us through this course, I appreciate it.