Reading Time – 8 minutes

As I’ve been talking about in my podcasts and live streams for several months now, I have vowed to make 2024 the best year of my life. This will be difficult since my life is extremely good; over the past 17 years, I’ve lived some amazing years, which means 2024 needs to top all of them. This will be the first in an irregular series of articles documenting my journey to make this happen.

I’ve also recently emerged from several problems, all of which were my fault (since everything in my life is my fault), many of which were by-products of being in the Scaling Phase of my main company, this one, Sovereign CEO.

Both of these things, making 2024 my best year and adjusting for a newly scaled company, means that I must, once again, re-evaluate where I’m spending my time and make the proper adjustments to my typical week and work day to get the significant results that I want.

I’ve talked before on my blogs about doing a time audit. This is when you take at least three days in a row that you consider typical work days and write down literally everything you do, when you do it, and how long it takes. You then feed all of this information into a spreadsheet, categorize your tasks, and then you can see exactly where you’re spending your time.

You then determine if you’re spending the time in the right places to determine the maximum ROI you’re getting on your daily activities. Then you make changes as needed.

I’ve also talked about the difference between SW (Standard Work, work you need to do but that doesn’t grow your income, like checking your email or fixing website problems) and IW (Improvement Work, work you don’t need to do but that will increase your income, like doing new marketing).

At one point, my IW representation in a typical week was very healthy. This was followed by “high quality” SW I was doing, and I was doing very little normal SW. This is exactly how your schedule should look.

The problem is, when you scale a business, after making a shitload of changes and adjusting for those changes, your IW/SW ratio gets out of whack again, causing you to re-evaluate your time usage yet again. This is exactly why whenever I talk about doing a time audit, I also say you need to plan to do a time audit again in about a year or two since things will have changed.

In a growing and changing business, SW is always creeping up on you. Namely, because tasks that were IW eventually become SW, as well as the fact that new IW tasks spawn new SW tasks, and often you as the business owner will (incorrectly) start to do those new tasks.

So once again, I find myself at a place where I need to start outsourcing all kinds of new SW tasks that I find myself doing. In addition, making 2024 the best year of my life is also going to require that I outsource all non-work SW tasks I’m doing as well. I will describe how I’m going about doing both of these things.

Outsourcing My Work Tasks

I have a reasonably large team of people helping me, so it’s not like I’m doing a hell of a lot of SW stuff in a given week. I have admin people, coaches who work for me,  bookkeeper, technical guy, CFO (my newest addition), graphic artist, accounting firm, several legal firms, and others. Sovereign CEO is a mature business (having been born in a very different iteration back in 2009) so I’m not exactly starting from scratch.

However, the “SW creep” I described above has definitely taken its toll on my schedule, especially in the last six months, so now I’m doing a bunch of shit I should not be doing as the CEO of the company. I need to spend most of my time creating content and marketing as my two primary tasks, and a little time working with clients and managing department heads as my two secondary tasks. I should be doing nothing else.

This means that any SW tasks I’m currently doing that do not fall in one of those four categories need to be eliminated from my schedule. If they’re not important, I can just delete them. If they are important, they need to be delegated (or what we like to call, “elevated”) to other more capable people so I can focus on my four main tasks.

Here’s a list of a few things I’ve been doing lately that do not fall in this category that I need to elevate to others:

• Posting certain social media content (I can write the content, but I should not be posting it)
• Calculating my weekly time usage (I should just be looking at the reports, not preparing the reports)
• Deleting old videos and other content when our hosting systems get too full (Google Drive, Zoom, Kartra, Amazon S3, etc)
• Double-checking certain payables before vendors are paid
• Several technical functions
• Adding or modifying small websites
• Managing my calendar (both my daily/weekly calendar as well as my overall annual calendar)
• Handing some “Level 2” customer service questions or problems
• Handling aspects of our joint ventures
• Coordination with some of our legal firms
• My own five flags paperwork (corporate docs, etc)

All of these things, plus more, need to be eliminated from my workload as soon as possible. I am working with a key team member, Aashir, to do exactly that. By the time you read this article many of these tasks will have already been outsourced.

And again, once all these are elevated to others, I will have to evaluate my time in a year or so and go through this entire process all over again. I will have to do this regularly until all of my companies are scaled to exactly the size I want them. At that time I will elevate the entire management function of all of my companies to a CEO or COO and I will become the Chairman and/or figurehead who creates content but does very little else. (I’m about 2-3 years away from that at the most.)

Outsourcing My Personal Tasks

Outsourcing my work isn’t enough, not if I want to make 2024 the best year of my life. In my typical day, I need to be in bed 8.5 hours per night for maximum testosterone, energy, and anti-aging. That means I only have 15.5 hours left to do all of the following in a typical day:

• Put in about 10 hours of real work, timed with a timer
• Exercise (required to not get fat as I age and to maintain high energy throughout the day)
• Meditate (required for maximum work focus)
• Extensive (and painful) stretching routine (required because I’m old, i.e. almost 52)
• Business reading (some days, not all days, and yes I know I can use audiobooks but with more technical business books that doesn’t work)
• Focused thinking time (some days, not all days)
• Eat 1-3 times (unfortunately required because I’m a human)
• Personal time with my wife and, um, other people in my life (required for happiness, energy, and stress relief)

That’s a hell of a lot to pack into a 15.5-hour day. This means that all of my other life overhead and bullshit needs to be outsourced to other people immedately. In my life, this includes things like:

• Buying/ordering groceries
• Buying/ordering household items
• Food prep
• Organizing my daily vitamins
• Loading needles once a week for my TRT
• Filling the various water tanks in my apartment (filtered water for drinking and washing)
• Running various errands
• Local banking, documents, and other physical financial errands
• Paying personal bills
• Managing all of my personal appointments (doctor, anti-aging, blood donations for TRT, massages, maids, etc)

As you can see, most of these tasks require a human being physically located in my city (Dubai) to perform instead of someone online. Therefore, I’ve hired my driver Tufail to start taking on all of these tasks. I’m training him now with SOPs (documented procedures). Normally my wife could help me with some of this stuff but she’s on the other side of the planet for a few months, and even when we’re together she’s just as busy as I am with her work, dog, frequent gym workouts, beauty appointments, and other girly shit.

When all of this outsourcing is done, I’ll have something I’ve been close to achieving but never quite had 100%: A total and complete coverage of all personal and work SW tasks so I can completely focus on my Mission and scaling my income to achieve some big goals I’ve set for myself for April of 2026 when I turn 54 and shift into the next phase of my life.

But Caleb, doesn’t this cost a lot of money to outsource all of this stuff???

No. It will pay for itself. Here’s why.

Of course it’s going to cost me money to pay people to do this stuff initially. That doesn’t matter because with all of that freed-up time, even if increase my income just 7-8% (actually even less than that) I will more than pay for the cost of these new expenses plus have a healthy profit on top of that. And I plan on increasing my income this year way, way more than 8% (fuck that, I’m going for 60-100% or more, and I’m serious).

So that’s what I’m doing at the moment. Your situation won’t look exactly like mine, but take aspects of what I’m doing that you can replicate in your life, and do them. You’ll make more money and be less stressed at the same time.

Question of the Week: Are Islamic Countries Better?

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H.G. Writes:

I’ve always heard the typical American take on Islam being negative, but I’m starting to see things differently. I caught Zuby sharing his experiences growing up in Saudi Arabia and he seemed genuinely grateful for his upbringing there.  And hearing about how much you like Dubai adds to that curiosity about life in Muslim countries. Just to be clear, I’m an atheist and not looking to get religious, but I’m getting the vibe that some places in the Muslim world might have some things figured out.

So, as a non-religious American who’s lived in the Middle East for a few years, what’s your take on this? Is it like, if you pick the right spot, some Islamic countries could actually be ahead of the West in certain areas? Or is there more to the story?

You’re being overly selective. There are 46 Islamic countries in the world! That’s a lot, dude. And there’s a big range between “good” and “bad” countries on that list.

Some Islamic countries can be really amazing places to live. Examples: United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Indonesia.

Some Islamic countries are horrible, dangerous shitholes. Examples: Niger, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Yemen.

Some Islamic countries are “okay” depending on how much money you make or the regions where you live within these countries. Examples: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Maldives.

Some Islamic countries are big, comparatively high-GDP, important economies while also being cluster-fucks with lots of problems and needing a lot of improvement. Examples: Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran.

So Islamic countries really are a mixed bag. Americans who think that all Islamic countries are hideous, totalitarian regimes full of terrorists are completely and objectively wrong (and idiots who don’t know anything about the world outside of America, which is the problem with Americans). At the same time, Muslims who say that all Islamic countries are somehow better or morally superior to the West are also objectively wrong (and ridiculously biased because of their cultural Societal Programming, which is the problem with extremely religious people).

We don’t live in a black-and-white, binary world, as much as many people these days think or hope we do. Trump or Biden, left or right, Muslim or Western, collapsing or doing fine, single or have a girlfriend, sucks or it’s great, it’s never, ever that simple. Levels of degree and/or shades of grey are everywhere, unfortunately.

I live in a technically Islamic country and yeah, it’s fantastic here, but the 2024 version of the UAE is the best Islamic country to ever exist for Westerners to live in, being superior in most areas to today’s Collapsing West. Places like Qatar and Bahrain are just behind the UAE and are pretty cool too, and Saudi Arabia is doing its best to catch up (with sometimes uneven results). But there are also a hell of a lot of Islamic countries in the world I would never live in or even use as flags, and you shouldn’t either. The five flags lesson here is to go for the best in any category you’re looking at, and don’t settle for anything less.

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