Two Very Different Approaches to Time Mgmt.

Started the new year with a new executive assistant, so it was naturally a good time to revisit how I’m using my time. I’ve cycled through countless productivity and time management systems over the years—most leading to more frustration and burnout than actual progress. So rather than looking for a silver bullet, I went into this year hoping to refine my approach by adding a couple of useful frameworks and tools to my repertoire.?

The two books I started with were Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell and 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkemann. I came across Martell through the Meta algorithm—his approach is direct, tactical, and tailored for entrepreneurs, though his style can be a bit…machismo. On the other hand, I found Burkemann through the Waking Up app (one of my favorites), and his book takes a much more philosophical (read: existential) approach to time. Reading them side by side made for an interesting contrast—one focused on optimization and efficiency, the other on embracing the limits of time itself. Both offered valuable insights, even if they often pulled in opposite directions.?

Buy Back Your Time: A Playbook for Entrepreneurs?

Martell’s book is written for entrepreneurs who feel like they’re drowning in work. His core argument is simple: Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time. This shift in mindset resonated with me. Instead of hiring reactively or thinking about delegation solely in terms of growth, the focus is on reclaiming time for the highest-value activities. (I think this advice is particularly geared towards people like me, who are naturally going to fill their time with more building, or building-related maintenance projects.)??

Key Takeaways:?

• The Buyback Principle: Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.?

• Know your ideal week/year: Mapping this out (and giving my EA visibility into it) helps manage inevitable changes, it’s not a recipe but an ideal.?

• Create playbooks relentlessly: I’ve already been implementing this, and one unexpected benefit is that it forces you to articulate things you don’t know quite as well as you think you do. That clarity makes delegation easier and more effective.?

• Audit-Transfer-Fill Cycle: Identify what’s consuming time, delegate what’s unnecessary, and be intentional about what gets added back in.?

• Managing energy > managing time: Martell emphasizes working on things that “light you up.” This is a good counterbalance to purely efficiency-driven productivity hacks.?

The book is very tactical, and I found myself implementing pieces of it immediately. But it also made me reflect on something deeper: Entrepreneurs often become addicted to chaos. Martell explicitly calls this out—how many of us thrive in urgency, confusing motion with progress. That one hit me hard because I’ve lived it.?

Earlier this year, I wrote about a new type of discipline—moving beyond the chaos-driven, “extra gear” mentality and instead focusing on being a grounded leader with a longer time horizon. For years, I prided myself on stepping in when things got tough: If you can’t do it, I’ll take care of it myself. But I’ve come to realize that this reflexive problem-solving isn’t what my team needs.?

I work alongside a deeply capable, hard-working team. My new discipline is different—and honestly, it feels a bit self-indulgent. It’s about prioritizing my mental and physical health, embracing time for the gym, yoga, or reading during the workday—things I once saw as luxuries but now understand as foundational to my role.?

I’m no longer in the trenches as an individual contributor (a lane I’ve excelled in). My responsibility now is to make sound strategic decisions, uphold our culture and values, and show up level-headed for my team. Maybe I’ve earned this shift after years of grinding, but that doesn’t make embracing it any easier. Martell’s book reinforced this shift—delegation isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about evolving as a leader.?

4,000 Weeks: Accepting the Limits of Time?

If Martell’s book is about maximizing leverage, Burkemann’s 4,000 Weeks is about confronting the fact that you will never “get on top of everything”—because the list of things worth doing is infinite.?

This book is a wakeup call in the best way. My wife and I each read it at the start of the year, and it led to some of the best conversations we’ve had about how we want to raise our kids, structure our work, and live our lives. She hates thinking about mortality, and this book forces you to do exactly that. J??

Key Takeaways:?

• The Futility of Optimization: The more efficient you become, the more there is to do. Email is a perfect example—being highly responsive just generates more responses.?

• Existential Overwhelm: There will always be more worthwhile things to do than time to do them. Productivity culture often feels like a losing battle because it is one.?

• Attention = Reality:? What you pay attention to determines your experience of life. This reinforced my need to limit work in progress—a huge shift I’ve been making at Advaita Health.?

• The Trap of Over-Planning:? “A plan is just a thought.” The more you try to control the future, the more anxious you become.?

• Every Choice is a Tradeoff: You will never “have it all.” Every hour spent on something is an hour not spent on something else. The real challenge is being at peace with that.?

Burkemann’s book pushed me to confront something I’ve wrestled with my entire life: the weight of existential questions. Since childhood, I’ve been obsessed with mortality, the cosmos, and whether life has inherent meaning. Ultimately, I’ve come to believe that while nothing matters objectively, we create meaning. And in that act of creation, we find fulfillment.?

As a leader, I see it as my responsibility to provide opportunities for others to craft meaningful, fulfilling lives. Burkemann’s insight that distraction is a refusal to acknowledge our finitude stuck with me. Every time we let our attention scatter, we act as if we have infinite time. But we don’t. What we focus on is our life.?

Reading this book reminded me that self-awareness and curiosity aren’t just professional skills—they are essential to living well. There will never be enough time, so we must choose deliberately and embrace the discomfort of limitation. The pursuit of productivity should serve our lives, not the other way around.?

Bringing It Together: Efficiency & Meaning?

What I loved about reading these two books together is that they offer complementary (but sometimes contradictory) perspectives.?

Martell’s approach is all about leverage and systemization—getting yourself out of low-value tasks, so you can focus on what matters most. Burkemann, on the other hand, argues that the pursuit of efficiency can become a distraction in itself, pulling us away from what’s actually meaningful.?

Where I’m Landing?

I’m keeping Martell’s playbook mindset, but using it to focus on less, not more. Creating systems, limiting work in progress, and handing off repeatable tasks to my EA (thanks, Kylee!), delegating to my team, or teaching my team how to delegate,? is already paying off.?

I’m leaning into Burkemann’s perspective that there is no perfect system—the real work is deciding what matters and making peace with what you’ll never get to.?

The goal isn’t to get “on top” of everything, so that one day I’ll be able to relax, but rather to build a life that I don’t need a break from.??

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