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Episode 49: Buy Back Your Time
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Jeremy and Catrin just wrapped a brilliant conversation on the podcast about Buy Back Your Time, and this one will hit a nerve with any “I’ll just do it myself”-ers…
Pricing leaders are used to delivering technical work, so delegation often isn’t our first thought. But what’s the cost of not delegating?
We dug into:
- A fab framework for categorising tasks to delegate
- The hidden cost of doing work you shouldn’t be doing
- How to build systems that free you to operate at your highest point of contribution
- The emotional resistance that stops smart people from delegating sooner
❌ This isn’t just for self-employed people, and we apply this specifically to pricing teams in companies big and small.
If you’re still using “Do, Delegate, Drop” as a mantra, you need to hear this!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Insurance Books and Delegation
00:00:00
Speaker
I think I'm getting the black lung pop. That's what I say when I know I'm being pathetic. it a me qui
00:00:12
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Price Writer podcast with Jeremy Keating and me, Katrin Townsend. Join us as we explore and discuss the world of insurance-related books, offering our insights and recommendations.
00:00:25
Speaker
This week, we're talking about how to delegate effectively to really make the most of your time and abilities. I know that's a big problem for a lot of us.
Exploring 'Buy Back Your Time' by Dan Martell
00:00:33
Speaker
The book Jeremy's been reading is Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell.
00:00:39
Speaker
I heard you talk about this book before. So Jeremy, tell me what it's all about. Yeah, I'll go straight into and say, I actually think this is a great book. I first read it a couple of years ago and I've read it a couple of times since as well.
00:00:51
Speaker
It is a about how to be most efficient with your own time and get best out your own skills. through largely delegation. There's some other parts in there about organizing your life and your world effectively, but mostly it's about how do we delegate effectively? How do we actually get people to do work for us in the best way we possibly can?
Effective Delegation and Task Selection
00:01:16
Speaker
The book is split into several parts. The first part of the book is all about delegation. So it's very much about nuts and bolts. How do I give tasks to people effectively? How do I monitor that they're doing them well?
00:01:27
Speaker
How do I choose the right tasks to give people? Which is often something we don't talk about, but can be quite important. In the pricing team, we're often like, right, I have to give making this model to someone, but actually that might not be the best way to go about it. might want to think about what part of the model building we give out and who we give them to. So actually maybe there is more that we can do in that area.
00:01:51
Speaker
There's how do we build processes for delegation is the next part. so you build playbooks, you produce material that people can work through, and then you monitor how well they're actually doing that.
00:02:05
Speaker
And then the third part of the book is about your own leadership and organizing yourself better and how you manage your own time and skills effectively. Wow, there's a lot in there and lots to unpack there. From what you just said, what we give to different people to turn the gate is something that interests me.
00:02:24
Speaker
The tension that I used to find as a manager was that there are some tasks that some people will find easier.
Balancing Delegation and Team Growth
00:02:30
Speaker
And so you might think, well, i'll give that person that task. But then are you just reinforcing that person's ability and you're just going to make them better at doing it. And at the same time, someone else is never going to get an opportunity.
00:02:45
Speaker
And equally, how do you delegate effectively in that way, but at the same time, provide development opportunities for people to really go and make sure that your task distribution, it's fair and even.
00:02:57
Speaker
It's not always one person doing the data work, for example. So does it talk about that all? Not directly. So I should say the book is very much aimed at someone running typically a small business.
00:03:11
Speaker
And it is quite geared towards people running software companies, which is Dan Martell's own background. In that way, you do have to take some of what's given and apply it. And that may take a bit of sort of hammering in on what he suggests.
Understanding the Drip Matrix Tool
00:03:26
Speaker
So as an example, he gets fairly near the start a tool called a drip matrix. And this is where you take the things that you do and you divide them up into four different types. and You and Ash struggling to remember. that So Dears for Delegate, I'm guessing.
00:03:46
Speaker
Yes. So the four stages are delegate, replace, invest and production. So these are all different quadrants of how you treat your tasks. And interestingly, this isn't about what's easiest to package up and give to people, which is a bit surprising. Okay.
00:04:07
Speaker
So does the task, in this case, he describes it as making money, which is fine for me because I run a small business, but when you're in a big company, it's more like how effective is it? How good a use of your time is it? And how does it line up with your own skills?
00:04:25
Speaker
Although I would say that I do think more pricing teams should think about what makes money for the business. I know that when I was a manager, I had a very strong sense of the P&L and there was a big profitability project going on. And do we really were counting, i said counting the pennies, but...
00:04:41
Speaker
counting the quarter millions and tossing it up as we go. And I actually think that's a really good way to motivate your team. So if your team doesn't currently check back in on the proposals they put forward and find that annualized profit number that it's adding, do you consider totting it up, making a totalizer and to motivate your team that way?
00:05:02
Speaker
I can see why it doesn't maybe directly translate for all teams, but I definitely think that maybe Post Impressionals could be better at checking the money. Yeah, I think that's actually really true. I do agree with you.
00:05:15
Speaker
Okay.
Task Enjoyment and Team Preferences
00:05:16
Speaker
So we'll say on one dimension, we have got what makes you money. and on the second dimension is he describes as what lights you up. So what do you actually enjoy doing? That's important. What are you good at? And do you enjoy doing it? Okay.
00:05:31
Speaker
So in the bottom corner, if it doesn't really make money and you don't enjoy doing it, delegate it. There's no real point in you doing that. So give it to someone else's day, right?
00:05:44
Speaker
It could be an assistant. It could be someone junior. It could be along those lines. The next segment, so if we go along the left, so it makes you money, but you don't enjoy it.
00:05:56
Speaker
This is an area where you want to replace. So you want someone with similar skills to you that can do the work. You still need to be involved in monitoring it and stuff, but you don't enjoy doing it. So give it to someone else to do.
00:06:12
Speaker
right. So if you've got stuff that lights you up, you enjoy doing it, but it doesn't really make you all the company money. That's called the invest quadrant. This may not necessarily be work related, but it might be your free time outside of work.
00:06:28
Speaker
Well, it could be something in work like learning skills that aren't necessarily directly translatable into your work, but you enjoy doing it. It's good for you. Okay. But it's not going make you any money. So we call that investing. It means investing it's in your wellbeing is mostly what it means. you hang I can see there definitely being times at work when I've had to do these things, not necessarily for my wellbeing, but also for my stakeholders wellbeing, which I guess is indirectly tied to my wellbeing, I suppose as well, if my stakeholders has given me a hard time about something.
00:07:02
Speaker
So I can see why there would be things where I'm like, oh, it's not really that value add, but you really keep banging on about this one topic. So let me do the analysis view, you know, then we can, for all our sakes, we can move on.
00:07:15
Speaker
yeah it could be investing in a relationship actually. And he does have a whole section that's about how it could be investing in a relationship, be it work or personal actually. that you enjoy doing it, but it's not making you money, but it's important. And then what you have at the top is it makes you money and you really enjoy it. So this is your production quadrant and this is what you keep.
00:07:38
Speaker
So if you genuinely, it's the most money made out of your work from this bit and you really enjoy doing it, it's okay to keep those bits. You don't have to get rid of them.
00:07:49
Speaker
And interestingly, I think a lot of people do this. We give away the stuff that we like, And we end up with jobs that we don't enjoy. so that's that's really interesting way of looking at it.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah. And I think we do that out of love for our team. You know, we do that because we want our team to grow and we want our team to enjoy their jobs as well. I always felt guilt in a way if I was doing fun tasks or a class that perceive as being more fun, like modeling and leaving the team to do slightly less fun tasks.
00:08:21
Speaker
I think that this comes out of a place of good intentions yeah that that we try and pass on the good stuff. What I realized is that things that I find fun ah not what everyone finds fun. Actually, yeah, I love a reconciliation. I cannot understand why the rest of the team don't love it. And this is a genuine issue I've had. no I'm not joking.
00:08:45
Speaker
cannot understand why other people are not getting the pleasure from doing a reconciliation that I would. didn Yeah, I found the same. i love modeling. That's like my favorite thing. I think most of you know me know that I love statistical modeling.
00:08:59
Speaker
I would quite happily build GLMs all day, every day. It just makes me happy. some people find that very and like crank the handle. It is quite repetitive in some ways.
00:09:11
Speaker
They would much prefer to be looking at a process and trying to suggest process improvement on it. I'm just like... Yeah, but you do that, then you have to like, rock and fuck like you say, the reconciliation, you have to wrap and, well, I've processed that and then, oh, you know, who knows what bugs and errors you might uncover if you go poking in there, but some people really, really like that.
00:09:31
Speaker
So yeah, I think it comes from a really good place. And as technical people, we have some very set tasks that need to happen to a high standard. And we have very high pressure jobs as well. Pricing is really high pressure. And a bead of change means that even if your team has a lot of automated processes, that probably makes it more pressured, not less.
00:09:53
Speaker
So i think there is a sense in which we try and delegate the fun jobs because we want the people who we work for to enjoy their roles as well. But i think you're right. it does lead to a lot of particular manager and senior manager going to discontent, but a feeling that, oh my goodness, this is hard
Mindset Shifts in Task Delegation
00:10:14
Speaker
and boring. and for sometimes Yeah, definitely. What we've ended up doing is keeping the bottom corner. So we've got the stuff that doesn't make money and we don't it doesn't light us up. So we've got like HR tasks.
00:10:27
Speaker
Uh, we've got, we've got things we just don't enjoy doing because oddly enough, and you're absolutely right. We tend to assume that people like the things that we like. that's the things that we often give out because we think of those as the development opportunities for everyone that they're going really enjoy. So actually we just get this role.
00:10:43
Speaker
So what you then do having made your quadrant is that you come up with a replacement ladder. Now the one in the book, I know this won't apply for the majority of pricing jobs. So he does admin, delivery, sales, marketing, and leadership, which really work in a small business.
00:11:04
Speaker
Admin, delivery, sales, marketing, and leadership. Okay. Well, I can see how admin applies that actually. If you can somehow incentivize your team to log their own performance targets or book their own holidays on the system or whatever it is, I can see that that would be a good thing for you to delegate.
00:11:25
Speaker
What's the next one? Delivery. Delivery. Okay. so So if you're in a small business, you would find someone who's very, very good at delivering the main product and you would get them in to produce and deliver the main product.
00:11:44
Speaker
I think the way this delivery applies to pricing teams is that so often the role of project manager is not actually assigned in a team and it's for whoever built the risk model or whoever built the street pricing part of the model.
00:12:01
Speaker
or it's someone in the deployment team who is just quite an organized person. It means that every everyone, every single time we want to change your risk model, someone who is not part of their day job, they probably haven't received any training about this.
00:12:17
Speaker
They are picking up a project management hat wearing it for a short time, then putting it back down. And then they might have to pick it up again next time they want to get a model deployed. It's not the building of the model necessarily, because for a lot of people that that bit probably then falls into the the bit that lights us up. But actually that delivering it, if you've got the most brilliant model in the world, but it's still on your computer phone, well, and I can't do anything about it, you know, it's not making us any money. it's like, if there was a way to have someone continually going through that
00:12:50
Speaker
leading you know guiding the way through the governance process, doing those documents and then the deployment of them. I can see that that would be a role that most people would hate.
00:13:02
Speaker
Most people pricing team would say, oh my goodness, please not me, please not me. But for certain people, yeah and I think it's a slightly different skill set as well, it's very different yeah skill set to...
00:13:13
Speaker
sit in a darkened room and do a reconciliation for three weeks. Love that. go love this um So yeah, maybe is there a role there that pricing teams don't currently have, but I think the large teams would probably really benefit from creating.
Integration of Diverse Skills in Teams
00:13:30
Speaker
The funny thing is actually, this is interesting. So i'll I'll bring it back to the book and say, yeah, something Dan Martell points out quite a lot is what you've put in your delegation quadrant, what you don't think lights you up or in your replacement quadrant, things you just don't enjoy doing.
00:13:45
Speaker
Loads of other people do enjoy doing those. You could easily look at this as, oh, I'm farming out the rubbish task to people and that's not very good leadership and whatever. That's the wrong mindset. Actually, lots of people do enjoy doing these things.
00:13:59
Speaker
And oddly enough, if you are someone who's ambitious in a pricing team, it's like an analyst and you want to manage and you want to lead one day. We do not often enough actually give those people project management tasks like you've just described that will be what they will end up doing when they are management.
00:14:19
Speaker
We tend to be like, you have lots of technical work, you're brilliant in the technical work and we love your technical work. So lots and lots of technical work for you shine as a technical person. And then we go, now manage a team.
00:14:32
Speaker
And that's hard for people. Or even worse, which I think it is then you turn around and say, oh, we think you're too technical. What's the leader team? but Of course they are. You've just spent my five years giving them all the backroom tests. Yeah, it's i I agree with you. I'm kind of realizing this as we're talking that the people we recruit look like us.
00:14:56
Speaker
Yep. Yeah. yeah And sometimes in more than our skillset, sometimes companies recruit from certain universities or certain degree courses. So we often recruit mini-me's rather than people with complementary skill sets that we could delegate to, but not just, here's a task that I don't want to do, but actually I'm giving this to you because you're better at it than me.
00:15:22
Speaker
And... Because I know that that's not a skill i I want to cultivate myself or that would be good at. We often recruit people who are almost like us, but but just less good in every dimension. Maybe we should consider recruiting people who are not like us. But there is that discomfort then, I think, as a leader, where you're like, oh, that person is actually way better at meeting at whatever it Does he mention that or is that just...
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, he loves it. And I've got to admit, I have embraced that mindset. It's not, I'll be honest, one that I probably had when I was a middle manager in a big organization. I probably was exactly like you described and like a lot of people in this situation.
00:16:03
Speaker
But actually there is nothing better than as a leader, having people that are good at things that you're not that work for you. You can't possibly run a good business otherwise. And to be honest, if you want to have a good team, it's probably the same. It's probably the same situation.
00:16:21
Speaker
I think there's definitely a lot to be said about having people with complementary skill sets to you. And I know one of my first management roles, my right-hand person was someone here was a lot more and so technical in terms of coding than me.
00:16:39
Speaker
and really enjoyed the like digging through unraveling the data processes and the plumbing and all of this. Oh, I've made the process 3% more efficient.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yup. And it was brilliant. It was brilliant. I said, this is the process that I'm, I'm a visiting. This is the end point of what I want. I've scoped it all out. I've spoken to all the stakeholders this is what's going work for them i just need this end point i'm not too worried about how we get there but can you build that and he was like yeah and he did a great job and It's difficult because I think you have to trust that people will see that and not think, oh, they're just giving up and they can't do it. But people will see it and go, wow, they've got the best out of the people they have.
00:17:28
Speaker
And but like you say, that they're using their own time effectively. But I think that there is some level of trust in how promotion and progression works with your organization if you do that.
00:17:39
Speaker
We've now talked briefly about chapter two chapter five of a 14 chapter book. So I think you can straight away go on board with the fact that this is got a lot useful information in it that you can genuinely apply.
00:17:54
Speaker
So as I said before, not everything is applicable to a pricing team, but i think with a bit of imagination, you can find lots of useful things in that. So later in the book, there's talk about how to recruit, which we did just touch on.
00:18:08
Speaker
But for instance, he very much advocates giving people some task-based interviewing, but make it quite realistic. So something you are actually going to do. Later in the book, he goes into more of the leadership side. So what can you do with yourself to make you much more effective?
00:18:26
Speaker
So for example, he talks about preloading the year. So this is planning your year very well. in order to make sure you do everything that you want to. Now quite an interesting interesting example that he gives, which is imagine you've got a pile of small stones, a pile of big stones and a bucket.
00:18:47
Speaker
If you take lots of small tasks, which you've got to do at work and imagine those are the pebbles. a And you've got some big items, which are say time with your family or your Christmas break or your kids production at their drama club and so on. So these are important things, right?
Planning and Prioritizing for Balance
00:19:07
Speaker
So if you fill up the bucket with all the gravel and the small stones to begin with, and then you decide to put in the big items, they ain't going to fit. That's the point. Okay.
00:19:19
Speaker
So start at the start of the year, look at your calendar and put on it the things that are going to be important. Now I know you don't always know when school productions are going to be exactly, but yeah, i know it can be really frustrating, can't it?
00:19:32
Speaker
But you know, roughly when they're going to be actually. So no doubt these things are going to happen at some point and you're going to have to make time for them. So put in all of your big items first.
00:19:45
Speaker
Then you put the little stones in and interestingly, this time you managed to put the big items in. There's actually an extension of this where you then fill the bucket up with water, which I will leave as a cliffhanger for you to read the book and find out all about the part. But it's actually just, it's quite a simple mindset. It's quite a well demonstrated thing to do.
00:20:06
Speaker
But get your calendar, put the big things on it and then fill the small things in around it. And I think this can apply and you effectively you work down as well. So it's your important things with your family, you've also got important things at work as well. So if you know you need to develop skills in order to move on to the next level, put timing for those.
00:20:28
Speaker
Otherwise you get to the end of the year and you're like, I never had time for that thing. Oh, that's a shame. Literally put it in at the start. You have to stick to it as well, which is often the harder a bit, but you put in the time for it and stick to it.
00:20:41
Speaker
So that's pre-loading the year. He also goes into how to divide up time in the day to match around your energy levels. So even if you're an introverted leader, you are going to have to meet with people. I'm sorry.
00:20:54
Speaker
So work out when you're going to do those. So when is the best time to meet with people? that Often when your energy is actually matches more up to being social rather than being a focused on work.
00:21:06
Speaker
So work out the time today that are best to do that and then color code diary and put in the relevant tasks in those relevant times. Now, again, we don't always in a big company get to control the times of days that we, that we have sensible meetings. People can put committee meetings in at times that really don't match up to our energy levels and so on.
00:21:26
Speaker
Dan Martell runs a business, so he's very much mastered his own business. We don't always get that much of it at work. But I think a lot of the principles buy really well. And again, this is just one small part of one chapter of the book. There is so much great material in there.
Automation, Delegation, and Efficiency
00:21:41
Speaker
And one thing we haven't talked about is automation. I know this is a big topic for pricing teams. So does he have any thought on automating processes, the best way to approach that, which quadrant that kind of falls in?
00:21:56
Speaker
Tell me about it. Yeah, so automation. So I would put this in the section, there's a chapter that he calls clone yourself. It's mostly around getting other people to do your work purely because that is the mindset of the author, but we can see it being automation.
00:22:13
Speaker
But it is about what do we, again, this, what do we get rid of? So get rid of the things you don't enjoy doing. If they don't make money or they do make money, that's fine. But automate those. Don't automate the...
00:22:26
Speaker
parts of the process that you actually add value to. Interesting. i'm going to talk briefly about reserving, which an area where I think people often make mistakes in what they try to automate. so automating the entire reserving process is failing to realize just how much value reserving actuaries put into the process.
00:22:44
Speaker
So the bit where you make your chain ladder and get your development factors does frankly not add value. And that is a good thing to automate, but trying to be like, we'll just automate like developing it to ultimate and then it's all done and brilliant. We'll take that number but is failing to realize the parts of the process that actually add value.
00:23:02
Speaker
I think my tip with automation is use the snowball method. Most people have heard about this in relation to debt. boom And if you have multiple different debts, the idea is is that you pay minimum repayments on everything apart from the one that has the highest interest rate on it.
00:23:20
Speaker
And you focus all your energy on that one highest. Everything else the minimum. But then once you've paid that one off, you can use all of that money and obviously the interest that you're not paying anymore on that debt and focus it on the next highest interest one.
00:23:36
Speaker
And the idea is it's like a snowball that at first you don't feel like you're moving the dial, but as soon as you paid off that first one, it's going to start to gain momentum and accumulate. And I feel that a lot of automation projects in insurance companies are big, big,
00:23:53
Speaker
transformation, automation projects. And we don't do enough of, oh, I just made that better. Yeah. You know? And so I remember saying someone in my team, i was like, so what have we not automated that process yet? And she's like, oh, just need three days. i just ah don't have three days to put in. I was like, okay, I'm going to do the tasks that you would normally do in three days so you can automate it.
00:24:20
Speaker
Because... Once that's automated, it's going to save you a day every single week. Yeah. So I'm just going to just just let's get that done, shall we? And i think like you're saying about this the stones and the pebbles,
00:24:35
Speaker
BAU so often is a whole load of pebbles. And if you can work out a way to to automate, it even if she hadn't have automated a whole lot, if she just automated one day's worth and then started feeling the benefit from that, then that would have given her enough time to start automating the next section and so on and so it forth.
00:24:55
Speaker
And so I think that that's another way that even if you're not in a position where you have a team or you have people you can delegate to, just even finding little wins on your time something that saves you 20 minutes while you then have 20 minutes go automate something else that saves you another 20 minutes you know yeah i think that's a really good point actually i should say one of the reasons for that replacement ladder is actually to say what you give away is things that you already do so don't get someone in to take over an entirely new area you
00:25:28
Speaker
Okay, it's the interesting point. So I think it works best with business, but I can see how it works in a team as well. So you're giving away the things you already know how to do. You can effectively oversight things you already know how to do.
00:25:42
Speaker
And this is part of part the issue. If you're in a small business and you decide you're going to get someone in to do something entirely new that you don't know anything about, It's be very hard to oversight their work and actually know that they're doing the job properly and well, and that you understand it.
00:26:00
Speaker
And you actually haven't removed anything from your own plate. that You've even got time to oversight that new work. That's quite interesting. So it's about giving away to people things you already do and know how to do and package them up and hand them over. There's a whole range of other things to we haven't even sort of covered. I mentioned at the start, the whole playbook and making processes so people can work through how to do things.
00:26:23
Speaker
That's interesting, that's similar to automation in a lot of ways, but it's actually laying things out so people can do it. And don't do that yourself. Get people to do it when they do the tasks. And then next time it's much more efficient. So you can see that automation. You can see that's building processes in the team.
00:26:41
Speaker
It's so much easier to hand over a team where you've done processes. And I know a lot of people are going to say, well, we do this and then we do that. And then we do that. And we're always changing what we do. And every pricing model build is different. And I do relate to some of that, that there is a lot of stuff that you do repeatedly that you could actually playbook at.
00:27:00
Speaker
like Well, it sounds like there is lot in this book. So strong recommend from you. Yeah, definitely. It's a really strong recommend for me. It's not even that long. It's a couple of hundred pages. so You can easily read over a few days. It's on Audible you want to listen to it too.
00:27:16
Speaker
It's really practical and I really like practical books. So it is something that's a lot of exercise and things you can really put in place in your work. Amazing. Great. Thanks for joining the Pride Photos Podcast.
00:27:40
Speaker
Pricewriters transforms pricing professionals into the most respected leaders in insurance. Find out more about our capability audits by visiting pricewriters.com.