Entrepreneur and Business Coach Richie Norton Shares the Secret of "Anti-Time Management"
Entrepreneur and business coach Richie Norton doesn’t quite “do” workdays. Here’s how the Anti-Time Management author spends his hours.
07:00
I live at Sunset Beach on Oahu’s North Shore in Hawaii, where all the big waves are. I wake up whenever (today it’s seven), drink water, take vitamins and walk my dog, Velzy [a Maltese Shih tzu], on the beach. It takes an hour or two because I’m checking my phone for client updates and messages from around the world. My company, Prouduct, makes 100 different products at a time so anything can happen between when I go to bed and when I wakeup.
09:00
I’ve learnt to set interviews and work calls at nine or 10am. There was a time I’d do them whenever other people wanted but giving myself predictability around when I meet adds value to those connections and flexibility to the rest of the day. A full calendar is an empty life because it means you’re not flexible to do the things you want or like to do. An empty calendar means you’re a leader because it’s handled.
11:00
I take a breather from the concentrated batching of my work and check in with my business partners and family. My wife and I always wanted to be available to take our three kids to school and pick them up. “Available” is an important word to me. You can be autonomous – you decide what you want to do – but you might not be available to do it. Now we’re homeschooling. I’ve realised that when I tell myself I’m being productive, I’ll put my head down for eight hours and get something done. But if I force myself to do the fun stuff or the family time – what I’m working for anyway – I’m able to get the same thing done in less time. No-one’s more productive than a procrastinator with an impending deadline!
12:00
First meal of the day: a pan-seared steak with avocado. I scroll through Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn and read the comments on my posts for inspiration. There’s this loop: I share, there’s feedback, where else does this need to go?
13:00
I know this sounds luxurious and, I’ve got to be honest, it is. Most days, the time between lunch and sunset is totally open. I’m not thinking about what’s next. If I was up late, I’ll take a nap. If the wind’s in the right direction, I’ll go surfing with the kids. Or we’ll go hiking or I’ll write. Then we’ll work on projects around the house or on our dream projects. For example, our oldest son, Raleigh, makes films; we discuss how to negotiate with producers 20 to 30 years older than him.
I don’t punish myself for being “lazy” because I’ve already worked on a dozen projects and a couple of interviews. I’ve tried to create an environment where productivity can happen and there’s space for the unexpected – both the good unexpected and the tragic. We have four sons; our youngest passed away. [Baby Gavin died in 2010.]
I didn’t always do it this way. I used to always be super-busy. And I realised, what am I working for? If it’s not for work’s sake, it’s for something else. Now I put the something else first.
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18:00
I watch the sunset every evening. It’s not a structured meditation – I’ll invite my family and whoever’s around or I’ll bring my dog. Every sunset’s an opportunity to reset. On hard days I’ll contemplate what worked and what didn’t. If I did wrong or there’s something I’m worried about saying or wish I’d said then I’ll consciously try it for myself: “Yeah Richie, you can let that go.”
19:00
I learnt a long time ago that an hour with my kids at the park, when I’m on my phone walking in circles, is not as exciting to them as five minutes with me on the trampoline. I plug my phone in to charge. We order from a Thai food truck across the street – chicken panang curry and mango coconut sticky rice –and eat it out of the box, on our couches, watching whatever my wife Natalie wants to watch.
Often people don’t really want their business or project; they want what they think will come after. Well, why not start there? And build the economic and strategic ways to support it? For me, travel is huge. I have set up my business in a way that I can be anywhere and get things done in any time zone. I believe that when you sacrifice what you love for success, you get neither.
21:00
The kids have no set bedtime. My wife and I are chilling, talking about where we want to travel. We talk about Raleigh moving to Africa to do mission work [the whole family are members of a Latter-day Saints church]. We talk about ways Natalie can scale her work coaching high-achieving women who want to overcome trauma.
23:00
When you’re a kid and the teacher says, “If you do all these good things, I’ll give you this jelly bean at the end of the day,” that was about control. But we do that. If you have a business, you need to build in from the start the freedom of time or the ability to travel or whatever your dream is. We have to rescue our dreams from the end of a timeline and put them first. If my head is spinning with ideas, I’ll write them down; otherwise I won’t sleep. I switch off the tech, black out the windows, turn the AC to super-cold and go to sleep.
A good cause
Academics often illustrate Aristotle’s theory of causation with a table, which comes to be through four “causes”: materials, design, a carpenter and – final cause – the table. So Richie Norton asks: “What’s the purpose of the table?”
“If it’s to make a family heirloom, build it. But if it’s to bring your family together, you don’t need to build a table.”
Managing time can itself become the final cause. Norton advocates starting with values then finding ways to support them. “If you move beyond goals and habits to what they were intended to create – the dream – you can better decide which goals and habits are useful and which aren’t. If you ask yourself, ‘What’s the job of the goal?’ it changes the goal.”
Image credit: Raleigh Norton
