It came from an Instagram account called Peak Performance with Julia. Here are twelve of the forty:

• Stop checking email after 6pm.

• Don’t reply on vacation.

• Take all of your vacation days.

• Use your sick time.

• Protect your lunch.

• Schedule your breaks like meetings.

• Block focus time every day.

• Turn down meetings that have no agenda.

• Say no to back-to-back meetings.

• Push back on the fake “ASAP.”

• Pause before you say yes.

• Remember that your value and your availability are two different things.

There are twenty-eight more, and you should go read all of them.

Each one is valuable advice. They apply to everybody who works, whether you work for somebody else, people work for you, or it’s just you working for you. If you have a job to do, you need most of these.

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Something about it kept bugging me

But I couldn’t shake the list. I thought it was great, and something was still itching that I couldn’t quite scratch.

Then it hit me. A company with a great culture, one that’s set up to give its team work-life harmony, shouldn’t need a list of forty boundaries.

Teach principles and then let people govern themselves.

The hustle culture cadet in me would have hated it

My past self would have scoffed at this list. As a recovering hustle culture cadet, I see that list as something that is keeping people away from work. It doesn’t follow the magic formula.

(My magic formula, for anyone new here: work 5am to 9am, then 9am to 5pm, then 5pm to 2am. Three workdays every twenty-four hours. Hustle culture taught me the power of time manipulation.)

Hustle culture still makes the same argument today. “That’s forty ways to get out of work. While you’re protecting your lunch, somebody else is working through theirs.”

I believed this garbage for years. (My wife was eventually kind enough to tell me how much of an idiot I was being.)

So with a directive from my wife, I set out to find a better way. And I did, and that’s what I built my accounting firm Incite around. We’ve averaged 42 hours a week during tax season multiple times, in an industry where the standard is 70 hours a week. And….the firm grew 492% in the following three years we implemented the better way. We’ve continued to grow since.

A few principles instead of forty rules

Here’s the difference I see. The list is forty rules, and a rule only covers specific situations. A principle covers the situations nobody thought of, so you need a lot fewer of them.

The first principle worth adopting is the 3.3 Rule. (Yes, it has the word rule in the name. Stay with me.) You do focused work for up to three hours, then you take a recovery break that’s thirty percent of the time you worked. That’s all there is to remember, and it adjusts with the person and the day.

Look at how much of the list that one idea covers. Breaks are now part of the workday. A meeting counts as work, so an hour-long meeting earns twenty minutes of recovery and the back-to-backs go away. And when somebody is on a break, they put up a little Slack emoji that says so, and the rest of us do our best to let them take that break.

The second is that we measure impact instead of hours. When results are what count, nobody earns anything by answering email at 9pm, replying from vacation, or skipping lunch.

Where I’d start

I’d start with the 3.3 Rule. One principle your team can remember will go a long way to not having to remember a list of 40.

The full version is in my book, Take Breaks, Work Better, including a chapter on rolling it out with a team, role by role. The sooner it’s in place, the sooner your people can stop defending their lunch.

Take breaks. Work better.

John

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So when I saw an article in USA Today about Buc-ee’s restaurant having an F grade. I was intrigued.

Here’s a related story to set the stage.

Joe Halderman was a CBS news producer and he wrote a screenplay about David Letterman. Okay sounds fine to me.

The problem was that Mr. Halderman in the screenplay talked about Letterman’s affair. And he asked Letterman for $2 million to keep the screenplay to himself.

Letterman was concerned because it was true that he, in fact, had an affair. After discussing things with his lawyer, his lawyer met with Halderman wearing a wire and handed him a fake check for $2 million. Halderman deposited it and then was later arrested.

Letterman then went on his own show and told the audience about the whole thing himself, including his affair. The story concludes with Halderman pleading guilty, spending 6 months in jail, and getting 6 months in jail with the admittance that his “deal” was a “thinly veiled threat”.

I read that as blackmail. Blackmail comes down to getting something out of a person by threatening them, most often with public exposure.

I bring up Letterman because of the two things he did. He owned up to the part that was true, in public. And he refused to pay to keep it quiet. I think that’s how you should handle complaints and bad reviews in your business, and Buc-ee the beaver is going to help me prove it.

Buc-ee’s got an F

In March, USA Today reported that 28 Buc-ee’s locations carry an F rating from the Better Business Bureau. The BBB says the reason is that Buc-ee’s failed to respond to 88 customer complaints. The oldest one was filed in March 2023 and the newest in February 2026. That’s 88 complaints in three years.

If you don’t know Buc-ee’s (I live in Utah and I’m not super familiar with the brand myself), it’s a Texas chain of giant travel centers with a beaver for a mascot. When I read the article, I tried to guess how many people go through one of these stores. It’s a gas station, so I guessed maybe a thousand people a day.....

I was off by about 14x.

1. The company says roughly 100,000 people visit a single store every week, which is more than 5.2 million a year.

2. The Daytona Beach store by itself gets about 14,794 visitors a day.

3. Numerator, a research firm that tracks shopping trips, puts the whole chain at more than 210 million trips a year.

Working from those figures, my estimate is somewhere between 500 and 600 million visits over the three years those complaints cover. Call it 550 million.

88 complaints out of 550 million visits is one complaint for every six million visits or so. As a percentage, that’s 0.000016%.

How much energy would you put into responding to that small of a percentage of your client base? Yet, how much energy do you allow yourself to spend fretting over a bad review?

Now let’s look at another point of data for Buc-ee’s. Numerator’s data shows Buc-ee’s shoppers give the chain a net satisfaction score of 90, six points above the convenience store average.

So the people who shop there give Buc-ee’s a 90 (which is an A in most grading scales I’ve seen), and the BBB gives it an F.

How does that happen? Buc-ee’s told the BBB that it doesn’t respond to complaints that come through the BBB. The BBB’s statement to USA Today was, “That is the company’s choice,” and it said the F reflects that choice.

I feel like this is the equivalent of some bully acting like a brat, saying, “Hey why are you ignoring me? I’m a bully and because you’re ignoring me I’m going to tell everyone that you’re the worst.”

One of my core beliefs is that people shouldn’t let a bully force them into anything. (That might be one of the reasons why I chose to do taxes to help protect people against the bullying IRS. #IRSsucks) So I love that Buc-ee’s looked at the BBB and decided to not play their game.

One caveat. I don’t know what Buc-ee’s does with complaints behind the scenes, and declining to answer through the BBB doesn’t mean nobody is helping the customer.

Who is doing the grading?

USA Today describes the BBB as a nonprofit whose aim is to give the public transparency about businesses. Here is some transparency about the BBB.

• Most of its money comes from the businesses it grades. CNNMoney found the BBB gets the majority of its revenue from membership fees paid by businesses. The BBB calls it accreditation.

• “Nonprofit” is technically accurate. The BBB is a 501(c)(6), which is the IRS category for business leagues and trade groups like a chamber of commerce. This is not the same thing as a charity which we often associate with the word “nonprofit.”

• Paying used to add points to your grade. In 2010, Connecticut’s attorney general called the rating system pay-to-play.

• A fake business named Hamas got an A-minus. In 2010, ABC’s 20/20 reported that a group of business owners paid $425 to sign up a made-up company named after the militant group, and it came back with an A-minus. ABC also taped two Los Angeles business owners being promised A-plus ratings if they paid $395 in membership fees.

• The BBB expelled its own largest chapter. In 2013, the national BBB kicked out its Southern California chapter after a pay-to-play investigation. The chapter’s answer was that the pay-for-play policy came from the national BBB. I think my kids call this gaslighting.

• Companies in trouble with the government kept their A’s. In 2015, CNNMoney found more than 100 businesses rated A-minus or higher despite serious actions by government regulators in the previous year.

• Your reviews don’t count. Customer reviews do not affect the BBB grade. You could have 10,000 five-star reviews on Google and they count for zero when it comes to the BBB’s grade.

• Remember what blackmail means? Threatening to go public in order to get something out of someone.

The BBB’s position is that there is no pay-for-play policy and grades are based on merit. You can judge for yourself based on that list.

Here’s how I view it. An organization that grades businesses gets most of its revenue from businesses that pay it. Picture a restaurant critic whose paycheck comes from the restaurants in his membership program. I don’t know what you’d call that but it feels like a pretty big conflict of interest.

And then there’s the opinion thing. In a courtroom, the grade is only an opinion. On the website, it’s an A through F sitting next to your company’s name like a report card.

Is it blackmail? I’m not a lawyer, the legal bar for that word is high, and I’m not accusing anyone of a crime, even though this does feel criminal. My opinion is that it works like a shakedown. Eighty-eight forms out of half a billion visits gets you an F, and the F comes with an offer to “work with” you.

“We have a guy at the BBB”

I know a service-based business that plays this game on purpose.

Their sales process is aggressive. In my opinion, they make promises on the sales call that the business can’t keep, because the only goal on that call is the sale. That creates upset customers, and upset customers complain.

So what did they build to deal with it? They told me they have a very liberal policy on refunding clients who complain to the BBB. I was also told, “We have a guy at the BBB. Just let us know.” The way it was explained to me, you pay the fee and their guy makes sure complaints don’t affect your grade. I can’t verify what their guy does or doesn’t do because I’ve never spoke to said “guy”.

They do the same thing in Facebook groups. Someone posts about a bad experience, and the business shows up asking, “What can I do for you so that you take down the post?”

There’s nothing wrong with asking an upset customer, “What can I do to make this right?” That’s a good question. It turns shady when it becomes, “What can I give you so this disappears?” Maybe I should have titled this article Blackmail and Bribery.

Here’s what I never heard them ask. Is the complaint true? Is something in our sales call producing this over and over? Can we fix it? They built a whole process for cleaning up the symptom and nothing for the cause.

We have an F too

While I was writing this, I looked up my own firm. Incite Tax has an F from the BBB. We are not accredited and there are 19 complaints on file with two of them show as unanswered.

We serve about 18,000 clients. Nineteen complaints is about one tenth of one percent of them. We also have 780 Google reviews with a 4.3 rating, which I’ll admit is a small number of reviews for a firm our size. It’s hard to get a happy client to stop and write a review. We’re all busy, and I understand it.

I could stop there and feel great about myself. Which in general I do. Our tax firm collectively does a great job, and we are 100% not perfect. We do make mistakes. And we ask the client how can we make it right and we do everything in our power to do that.

Also, not every client is reasonable or rational. Some are straight up psychotic.

We get threatened with a lawsuit about three or four times a year. One client sued us because he didn’t want to pay tax on the money he made selling his business. He had done his own research, and his research said he didn’t owe it. This is about as basic as tax law gets. There was nothing we could do for him except tell him we applied the law correctly and we weren’t going to put something fraudulent on his tax return. (Yes. We got sued for applying tax law to a tax return.)

There’s no process fix for that guy. You have to be comfortable that your process delivered a good service, and that sometimes the client is being unreasonable.

How I’d handle a complaint or a bad review

1. Look for the part that’s true. Before you decide the person is crazy, ask whether anything in the complaint is accurate. Letterman’s blackmailer had his facts right. A few of the Buc-ee’s complainers may have a point about that website form.

2. Fix where it came from. A refund takes care of one client. (Which absolutely could be the right thing to do.) Finding the spot in your process that produced the complaint protects the longer term efforts of your business. Your business will always do better when you fix root causes instead of only fixing symptoms.

3. Respond with the facts. When someone says, “I’m going to tell the world about my bad experience,” my answer is okay. Fine by me. We’ll respond with what we did on our end so the world can see the facts next to their version.

You can’t be held hostage by a story you’re willing to have told in public. That’s the benefit of being honest, and I believe it’s why honest businesses are more successful over time.

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Fix the business and ignore the grade

I see business owners putting a lot of energy into keeping the BBB happy, into keeping the people who use the BBB happy, and trying to make the unreasonable person happy. So I have a question for you.

When have you ever looked up a company’s BBB grade before deciding where to spend your money?

I never have, not once. And my experience tells me the people who rely on the BBB are rarely the clients any business would choose to work with. If you’ve used it and it helped you, leave a comment and tell me, because I’d like to hear the other side.

Buc-ee’s has an F from the BBB and a 90 from the people who shop there. I know which one I’d rather have. I won’t be paying anyone to change our letter. That money and energy is going to the clients and the process.

The customer is not always right. But even the wrong customer, or the customer who’s incorrect, could be sharing something with you that’s worth acting on and highlighting something that needs to be fixed. I think we need discernment as business owners to realize where we put our energy.

If this was useful, share or subscribe. It’s free, and I write about what’s working and what’s breaking inside a 260+ person firm while it’s happening, because those lessons are a lot cheaper to read than to live through. And obviously I also write about productivity and the ins and outs of taking proper breaks.

Take breaks. Work better.

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I saw a clip of Alex Hormozi the other day, and before I get into the clip, let me say a couple of things about Alex.

First, he is one of the sharpest business minds out there. He’s also an incredible marketer, which is what led to his initial success. I have a lot of respect for people who understand marketing so well, because everything seems to go well for them in the business world as far as revenue growth is concerned.

Second, I have consumed enough of his content to form an opinion that he lives in the hustle culture world. He is a proud, card-carrying member of hustle culture.

Both of these statements are true. He says things that are valuable that any business owner can learn from, and he pushes a work methodology that I do not believe is healthy. If you’re a Substack subscriber, I know you’re with me on the idiocy of hustle culture.

But just because we’re on the work-life harmony side doesn’t mean we have to plug our ears when someone from hustle culture shares advice. Alex likes being productive, and so do I. This particular piece of content resonated with me because we’ve been doing it at Incite for years.

The exercise

Here’s what he recommends, and then I’ll give you my tweak on it.

For one full week, from 5am to midnight, set a timer for every 15 minutes. When it goes off, write down one or two words describing what you just did. That’s it. Pretty straightforward. You’re not trying to be a better person while you’re tracking. Just do things normally, because the goal is to have visibility on what you are doing.

Alex also says there are 672 fifteen-minute blocks in a week, and having that much data will definitely give you some ideas on where your time may be wasted.

Now, I need to provide a quick accountant interruption, because I can’t help myself. 672 is the number of 15-minute blocks in a full week (all 24 hours). If you’re tracking 5am to midnight like he’s suggesting, it’s only 532 blocks. But look, Alex is a marketer, and 672 sounds bigger and scarier and more dramatic. That’s why he’s a great marketer. I’m a CPA, and I’m more of the “just give me the facts” type, and then I hope the facts speak for themselves.

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My tweaks

First, if you currently do not wake up at 5am and stay up until midnight, let’s adjust the hours. That schedule only accounts for five hours of sleep, and I think most people need more than five hours to be healthy and to keep from going insane.

I also think you should only be tracking blocks during the time you intend to be working. If you’re in leisure time outside of work, I don’t care how you spend it. This is about making your workday more productive. This idea of wasted time has gone too far. The time is going to pass regardless. Just because I choose to take a 15-minute nap instead of doing something that generates revenue doesn’t mean those 15 minutes were wasted. Not in my book. (Literally, not in my book that was published August 2026)

If you work 9am to 5pm, do the 15-minute blocks in that time frame. If you want to include your morning routine, go ahead and track that. If you have an evening routine, feel free to include that as well. I personally tracked an evening routine for a while when I was trying to improve my sleep. But my evening routine might only be an hour long. When the hours between finishing work and going to bed are five or six, I don’t need to track all of that, and I’m suggesting you don’t need to either.

So assuming you track from 9am to 5pm in 15-minute blocks, that’s 224 blocks over the whole week, or 160 blocks during your five-day work week.

What this looked like at Incite

During my fourth year in business, Incite had a very strong year of revenue growth. Revenue went up by $500,000, which was a 35% increase. We had more clients. We had more tax returns. We worked more hours. More revenue, yes. And profit was exactly the same as the year before. All that extra work and zero additional profit to show for it. We were so busy being busy that nobody stopped to ask whether the busyness was producing anything. It’s one of the reasons one of my shirts says, “The definition of hustle is the mistake of thinking busyness equals productivity.”

We sat down with our accountants and tracked activities for a week. What did they work on? When did they start it? When did they stop it? Then we organized that data.

We discovered that our tax professionals, the people we were paying the most specifically because of their tax expertise, were spending more than 30% of their time on work that didn’t require tax knowledge. Sorting through documents. Chasing down missing information. Responding to emails that were just asking for copies of things. That realization allowed us to change some job descriptions and functions, place ownership of responsibilities on different roles, and our profitability increased the next year.

We also recently ran this exact same time tracking activity with our admin team leads. We found that 45% of their time was going to answering internal Slack messages, and the questions being asked were questions we already have documented answers for. That uncovered two unfortunate things for our business. The admins weren’t looking things up before asking, and the team leads were handing over the answer every time instead of pointing them to the resource and asking them to try that first. One habit was feeding the other. I’m not sure we would have caught this if we hadn’t done the time tracking exercise. There’s no telling the wealth of good data you’ll find by doing this yourself.

The interesting part is that, if you really think about it, no one was being lazy in these scenarios. I see a group of people working, just not working as effectively and productively as they could. In many cases, the way we work remains invisible to us unless we bring it to the forefront. This time tracking activity provides that visibility.

How to run it

We’ve talked about the 15-minute blocks. Put one or two words for what you did. Do it during the days you work. You don’t need to go all in like Alex Hormozi and track from 5am to midnight, but I do recommend you pick a normal week. Don’t pick a vacation week. Don’t pick a week where you know you’re working overtime because of some deadline you’re trying to hit.

As you look at the information you’ve collected, the final step is to categorize it into one of three buckets: work that only you can do, work someone else could do, and work that doesn’t need to happen at all.

And now the work-life harmony part that needs to be added. I want you to look at the long stretches of working blocks. Did you take adequate recovery blocks during those stretches? If you didn’t, I invite you to read my book, “Take Breaks, Work Better,” and the other articles I have here on Substack that cover breaks and how to apply them to your normal workday. You will thank yourself later as you develop the habit of taking recovery breaks during the workday.

If you want some resources to help with this, I’ve put the time log template and the do-delegate-delete worksheet in our free tools. You can download them at takebreaksworkbetter.com/tools.

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At Incite, much of August could be categorized into one of two buckets for me. Things I couldn’t control, and things I couldn’t see going on inside my own company.

Quick sales pitch: What is one decent business idea is worth to you. If one line in here saves you from a delayed or forgotten project, a refund you shouldn’t have paid, or six months of assuming somebody was working on something they abandoned in February, what’s that worth? The annual fee for this is worth it. That’s why I write it every month regardless of how many people have upgraded. I believe in the value that much.

Onto the month.

Why I Don’t Like Five Year Plans

Your business and the business environment changes too quickly to heavily rely on a 3 to 5 year plan. I haven’t had a detailed 5 year plan for a decade plus and things have worked out pretty well for us.

Case and point. Eighteen months ago I didn’t know we’d be unwinding the sales vendor that brought us ten figures plus of revenue. I didn’t know I’d be hiring a CFO or looking at acquisitions. I didn’t know AI would change what an admin job even is at our firm. I can’t imagine how hilarious it would be to look at 18 months ago and this 5 year plan many douchprenuer influencers said would be a good idea to create.

The one target I do like though, 3 – 5 years out, is the revenue number.

A big revenue number works for one simple reason. Revenue forces the only two behaviors that keep a company alive. Get new clients, and keep the ones you already have. Admin and IT keeps clients by not dropping the ball. Tax and bookkeeping keep clients by communicating. Marketing brings them in and sales closes them.

Now, I do have detailed plans and goals. They are just broken out quarterly over the course of a year.

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Like most business owners, I believe at some point I’m going to sell my business.

I don’t know when. Could be three years, could be ten. There’s no deal on the table and I’m in no hurry. But it’s going to happen eventually. And I want to avoid the scenario where a buyer shows up and we end up having to scramble to do all the things that have to happen when you sell.

So we started getting our ducks in a row now. I recommend you do the same thing. A business ready to be sold is more profitable, productive, and I dare say, more enjoyable than a business that isn’t.

One duck we are working on rowing is our financials. A firm our size will be expected to have GAAP financials. (Which is a really stupid accounting method). For a tax firm that means revenue recognition gets painful, because we collect money in May for returns we won’t file until April or October the following year. Under GAAP, which is CRAP, a big chunk of what feels like revenue sitting in the bank is a liability until we do the work. Our equity line now reads negative because of it. We have a profitable business, but GAAP says it’s running at a loss. So flipping stupid.

So basically…..you can’t run a business off GAAP financials.

GAAP exists to make our numbers comparable to somebody else’s numbers. It’s built for outside investors. It is not built for me sitting down on the fifteenth of the month trying to decide whether we can afford another hire, or figuring out why our merchant fees dropped (which unfortunately they didn’t). So we need a second set of books. Managerial books, running alongside the GAAP books. The second set will give me better data to make decisions than GAAP does.

That’s one of the reasons we brought on a CFO. Two sets of books, one in the format buyers want, and another in a format I can use.

The Stuff I Don’t See

This is the second bucket. A delayed project, and why it shouldn’t have been delayed (huge lesson for us). Insights as to why a company full of people who follow instructions perfectly still hits a ceiling. And the refund decision tree we built.

If you’re not ready to upgrade, no hard feelings. Go ask one person on your team what they’re waiting on right now. It will give you valuable insight, and likely ruin your afternoon. No need to thank me for that.

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We live in Utah, and Utah is the state leader in language immersion for secondary education. It just so happens that when we moved in 2012, the school district we landed in had Chinese as their language. All four of our kids have been learning Mandarin since first grade.

We figured 2026 would be the best year to take them to see the homeland of the language they’ve been learning. Our oldest just graduated from high school and our youngest is in middle school. That age range felt right. Go too young and some of them might not remember it. At their ages now, they could also understand the differences between China and the U.S. more fully, which was one of my goals.

I lived in Argentina for two years in my early college years, and experiencing a different country made me very grateful for the freedoms we enjoy here in America. I didn’t want this trip to be wasted. I was hoping they would see some of those differences and come away with a similar gratitude for where we live.

China is a far trip, a lot of hours on a plane, so if we were going over there, we wanted to make the most of it. That level of planning meant budgeting for it and clearing the calendar for it.

This article is not a travel log of our China trip, so here is my quick summary and one observation. As a family, we eat Chinese food maybe three times a year, and the Chinese food we do eat is very Americanized: delicious sauces, lean meats. The authentic kind in China is definitely not what we get here. And….well….we didn’t like the food.

We did enjoy seeing all the things you would expect to see in China, like the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors, and the pandas. We also visited where they filmed the Avatar movies. Absolutely beautiful! Overall, a great experience to do once, but I don’t think any of us are dying to go back.

Here’s why I’m telling you about our China trip. Something else happens on trips like this, though, and it wasn’t the first time I’d felt it. I’ve taken vacations longer than a few days before. Somewhere in the middle of this one, which was 16 days, there’s a release. I don’t know how else to describe it. The best word I have is a reset. The stress I carry day to day from business responsibilities lets go. Physical tension, literally, releases. My body moves better. I sleep deeper. I don’t have restless nights thinking about the thing I have to handle for work tomorrow. On every trip longer than a week, I’ve had some version of this.

In my leisurely reading, I came across something that explains why. A team of Dutch researchers tracked 54 employees through long summer vacations (23 days on average) and published the results in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Health and well-being climbed fast at the start and peaked on the eighth day. That matches my experience.
Then it included this, which caught me off guard. After the eighth day, not much changed. How long the vacation lasted was only weakly related to how much better people felt.

Then the depressing side of the study: for most of these employees, the happiness gain was gone within the first week of being back at work. One of the same researchers titled an earlier paper “Lots of fun, quickly gone,” which about sums it up.

Their conclusion was that more frequent, shorter breaks probably do more for you than one long one.

(And not to derail the main message of this article, I do believe there is a place to have four week vacations as well. Maybe that’s a future post.)

I read that and thought, well…..that’s the 3.3 Rule.

As a quick reminder, the 3.3 Rule says to work up to three hours, then take a break equal to about thirty percent of the time you worked. Then go again. The whole idea is that recovery works best when it comes often, in doses your brain can use, instead of getting saved up for one giant withdrawal. Your body does not care that you have a beach week planned for next March. It needs something at 11:00am today.

Even more directly tied to the study is a principle my friend Brian Herriot lays out in his newly released book, Time Freedom. (Definitely get your copy today.) His argument is that waiting 20 or 30 years to retire and finally enjoy your life is this same long vacation problem stretched across your entire lifespan. So instead, he recommends mini retirements. Plan them now. Take them along the way. And he gives you practical steps to make it happen in a very short amount of time. (Five-star review from me. Highly recommend.)

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So we have three examples: the 8^th Day study, Brian’s Time Freedom, and my 3.3 Rule. They share a common principle. Recovery has a shelf life. We have to keep coming back to it on a regular basis instead of saving it up for one giant use.

I know there will be doubters. Someone reading this is thinking, “John, I can’t take a break every quarter. I have a business to run. People count on me.” I get it. Feeling responsible for your team, for the family you support, for the clients who pay you, that’s a good thing.

And to do that at your best, you need breaks. Breaks during the day, mini retirement experiences, shorter vacations. All of those let you show up as your best self. If you leave those breaks out of your life, I promise you, as well-intentioned as you are, you are not giving the people in your life your best.

I believe the sentiment of “I can’t take a break every quarter, people count on me, there’s too much to do” comes from guilt. I’m not a licensed therapist, and I’m not going to pretend I know how to help people with their guilt.

All I can tell you is how I got past mine when I first started taking time off. Because I definitely felt the guilt. I needed the experience of taking the time off. I accepted that I felt guilty about it, but I had read the science, so I was willing to try it out. Then each time I took a break and came back, the worst-case scenario I’d been afraid of didn’t happen. Now I had a positive experience to build on, one that taught me taking breaks doesn’t end the world and doesn’t take anything away from what I give my clients. In fact, I was finding it was improving my ability to do so.

If you run the same experiment and create one small positive experience, you will be able to build on that foundation. So take breaks. Take breaks during the workday. Take breaks for long weekends or shorter vacations. Take breaks to enjoy mini retirement experiences. Take a break before you enter a season you know will be busy, and for sure plan one for the moment that season ends. Breaks like these are small enough that nothing gets crippled. Most people, including your business, may not even notice you were gone. I know Incite didn’t.

My family will still do a big trip now and then. We try for two family trips a year and one for just my wife and me. But I’ve stopped treating the big trip as the one time I take time off, hoping it will be enough of a recovery to last me the whole year. It doesn’t work that way. It has to be more frequent. Real recovery happens in small, regular bursts in the mundane day-to-day of the work week.

The full version of how we run all of this at Incite, my accounting firm, like the daily rhythm, what counts as a break, what makes a bad break, how to protect your calendar, and a whole lot more, is in my book, Take Breaks, Work Better. Pick up a copy today.

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Substack has also added an AI detector using a software called Pangram. AI detecting AI. Makes sense. This has some concerned though because the track record on these tools aren’t great. For example, a post published in 2008, well before modern AI, was flagged by Pangram as AI-generated. Pangram itself says detection tools can provide useful initial flags but shouldn’t be used as sole evidence.

I know I’m seeing content that is clear AI slop. No one wants that, and those that are using it that way aren’t fooling anyone. That type of usage is 100% giving AI a bad rap. It’s that type of AI slop that has many asking, “is this stuff making us dumber or smarter?”

Researchers have looked into this for us. And if you’ve read my newest book or other substack articles….you know I love me a research study.

MIT’s Media Lab published a study in June 2025 called Your Brain on ChatGPT. They took 54 people, put EEG headsets on them, and had them write essays across multiple sessions. One group used ChatGPT, one used a search engine, one used nothing but their own head. The brain-only group showed the strongest, most connected brain activity. The ChatGPT group showed the weakest. And when the ChatGPT writers were later asked to write without it, many couldn’t quote sentences from essays they had just finished. The researchers called the effect cognitive debt. Sounds like a good recipe for AI slop.

Second study, from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon. They surveyed 319 knowledge workers and collected 936 examples of AI use on the job. They found that the higher confidence people had in AI, the less they thought critically. AI is making us more stupider.

But why stop there? Harvard built an AI tutor for its intro physics course and ran a randomized experiment with 194 undergraduates. Students using the tutor learned roughly twice as much as students covering the same material in class, in less time, and reported being more engaged while doing it. Wait? They didn’t learn take twice as long to learn? Nope. You read that right. They learned twice as much.

Well, this is getting confusing.

Ok. Maybe this will help give us clarity. The World Bank ran a randomized trial in Nigeria. Not the Prince in Nigeria that has a gold mine you inherited. This trial was real. Students used AI for English tutoring over six weeks, with teachers guiding the sessions. The learning gains equaled somewhere between one and a half and two years of ordinary schooling. In six weeks! That puts the program among the most cost-effective education interventions ever measured. Six weeks!

A couple conflicting studies. Shucks. Actually, it’s my favorite thing. I think there is too much polarization in today’s world and we need to come together. This gives us just the chance to do that.

In the MIT study where those that fully used AI had the worst connected brain activity of the study, the researchers acknowledged that their lab setup didn’t match how people use AI in real life. They also discovered that the participants who wrote from their own heads first and brought in AI afterward showed the strongest brain connectivity of anyone in the study. Think first, then bring in the tool.

In the Microsoft study, they didn’t just find that those that heavily trusted AI had less critical thought. They also found those that had higher self-confidence exhibited more critical thinking. trusted their own skill, the more they checked the work, the higher level of critical thought.

The most important element that ties these studies together, the element that makes these seemingly contradicting studies match is this: who did the thinking?

When people handed the entire job to AI, their brain disengaged and their work got worse. When a human stayed in charge and used AI to support the work, people learned faster and performed better.

The way I see it, AI is exactly like every human consultant I’ve ever paid. Just a heck of a lot faster, cheaper, and accessible. When I needed help with whatever my business roadblock was, I found someone that knew how to do it better. I would ask them questions. I would listen. I would take their answer and apply it to my problem based on my own principles. I’ve paid people to help me write better. To edit what I’ve written. To create graphics for me. I’ve paid people to create presentations for me. I’ve paid people to advise me on how to have a difficult conversation. All things one can use AI for now.

Which brings me to my AI policy.

I use AI. Regularly. Intentionally.

Here is where AI shows up in my work.

Brainstorming. I use AI to think out loud and test ideas. I use AI to give me an excessive number of ideas so I can filter through them myself. I use AI to poke holes in my own thinking. I don’t use AI to give me ideas on how to be funny. I’ve tried that enough times to know AI sucks at that.

Copy editing. I use AI to give me suggestions on how something I wrote could be clearer and easier to understand. AI helps tighten my sentences. Sometimes it tightens too far which takes the soul out of my writing, so I politely, and sometimes annoyingly, tell AI that was a terrible edit. The final decision on every sentence is mine.

Research. I never accept an AI answer as the original truth. When it gives me information, I ask where it found it, then I go read those sources myself and verify. If a claim cannot survive that check, I do not use it. I used AI to find those four studies and their sources that are in this article.

Titles and marketing. I ask AI for title options built on marketing principles I have paid actual humans to teach me. Then I pick the option or combine options to better match what I want to convey.

I also use AI to help me as the CEO of Incite Tax. The purpose of this article was to be clear on how I use AI in my writing. But if you have questions about any of this, let me know. I’m an open book.

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The price I was charging was $200 for a personal tax return. I wish I could say I spent adequate time doing a market research study and determining what the price point was for tax returns, but no. I charged that because the guy I was working with charged that. Nobody forced that pricing on me.

I’ve always been good at taxes. I’ve been good at identifying the areas my clients can use to pay less in taxes. And I knew other tax professionals who were not as good as me, charging way more than I was. I allowed myself to be mad at this situation. And them. Who were they to be charging more than I was charging? How dare they?

The whole time, this price ceiling, this lack of valuing myself, lived rent-free in my head. It took coaching and mentors to help me break through. For a small business, I had good client acquisition systems. I had a good CRM and client onboarding system. I had a good delivery system. But I didn’t have a system to work on myself.

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I interviewed Julie Ciardi, an expert in helping people create systems to work on themselves. She is one of the eight presenters at my free virtual summit, the Run on Systems Summit, happening tomorrow.

She shared a simple formula about the age-old concept of Be-Do-Have. Too many people approach life with the attitude that once they have certain things, then they’ll do certain things, and become the person they feel will make them happy.

The best approach is the opposite. Be who you want to be. The version of yourself that makes you happy. That will naturally result in you doing the things that version of you would do. Which results in having things that genuinely make you happy.

Her formula is brilliant because it also highlights how many of us are reaching for success defined by someone else. Her formula includes a component that is you. Uniquely you.

I very much want you to register for the summit because you will learn at least one system from the eight speakers that will drastically change the trajectory of your business. So join us to hear her formula.

www.takebreaksworkbetter.com/summit

Her $15,000 lesson

Julie had a similar experience to mine. She left a vice president role at IBM in 2018. From then until the start of 2020, her business brought in a total of $45,000, all of which went back into the business. She was in debt, with a family of five, and a very supportive husband who was starting to ever so gently ask if she was ready to update her LinkedIn profile to get a job.

Julie has a fierce drive. So she spent $15,000 she didn’t have on a VIP day with a coach, expecting to walk out with strategy. This coach helped her identify her limiting beliefs. Fear of failure, sure, but also fear of success and fear of visibility. Over the 18 months that followed, she created $1.4 million in her business.

She now teaches a system that helps others have the same breakthrough, so that all those other amazing systems in your business can be effective.

Where to watch the full session

The Run on Systems Summit airs tomorrow, August 20, from noon to 4pm ET, and it’s free. Julie’s session sits alongside seven others, all focused on building a business that runs on systems. So grab your spot now at www.takebreaksworkbetter.com/summit.

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Then our company read Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman, a book that thoroughly goes through the client cycle within your company, from knowing nothing about you to hopefully becoming a raving fan. It turns out there are eight stages in this process. Taking their money and then delivering the service are just two of those eight stages.

Joey’s research shows that 20% to 70% of new customers stop being customers within the first 100 days of signing up. And the scarier part, which I totally feel like I lived: most business owners don’t even realize this is happening.

So when I decided to put on a virtual summit about running on systems, a summit designed to help business owners get impactful, actionable steps within just an afternoon, Joey Coleman was the first person who came to mind as someone I would be so honored and thrilled to have present.

The stars aligned. I must have been eating my Wheaties and living right, because Joey agreed to do this. And in my interview, Joey walks us through the eight stages we need to be aware of within the first hundred days of a client’s experience with us.

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Buyer’s remorse

One of the things we discussed was the buyer’s remorse stage, or in this case, the anti-buyer’s remorse stage. It’s the stage that, when businesses handle it well, helps clients get over buyer’s remorse or never even consider it in the first place. This stage starts the second the client signs the contract and pays you money, and it ends when you deliver the service.

Buyer’s remorse lives in the gap between those two events, and for a tax firm, that gap can be a really long time. Joey helped me see that we were ignoring this stage entirely. And with a little bit of attention from us, we could make a huge difference in the longevity and long-term retention of that client.

In fact, in Joey’s presentation he gives us a word-for-word script we can use to communicate with a client in this window, and it’s good. It’s a definite don’t-wanna-miss type of moment.

You know more than they do

One of the other phases we really dug into was the phase that helps the client get used to working with you. It’s all too common that, as business owners, we take for granted how much we know about our business.

And unfortunately, sometimes this means we feel like if the thought is in our head, then the client must understand what’s going on. It’s super critical to realize that while we may have done this thousands and thousands of times, this could be the first time the client’s actually doing it. Or maybe they only do it once a year. So they most certainly do not have your experience.

Which means we want to walk them through the process. We want to walk them through the lingo. We want to make sure they understand what to expect as we perform their service.

Joey calls this the acclimate stage, because we want clients to acclimate to how we’ll be providing our service to them. So we talked about what a business can do to hold the hand of the client, to walk side by side with them, and to help them understand how things are going to go. And in one of Joey’s clients’ cases, which he shares in the interview, he talks about how their close rate went from 30% to 90% with one simple change. And it’s a change so easy you’ll be able to do it too.

Where to watch the full interview

The Run on Systems Summit airs this Thursday, August 20, from noon to 4pm ET. It’s free, and Joey’s session airs once alongside seven others. Register at www.takebreaksworkbetter.com/summit so you’re in the room when it plays.

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A few years ago I hired a well-known company in the virtual assistant space. They started me off with a couple onboarding calls, got me excited about the service, provided me a couple tips on how to work well with my assistant, and made sure they understood my number one concern was email management.

Coming from my previous two assistants, the bar was so low you couldn’t slide a piece of paper under it. So things started off swimmingly. I saw potential and after four months or so we started the commitment decision. Do you want to work for us as an employee and get employee benefits?

That got us into the compensation conversation. My fee to the company was $8,500 per month. I was willing to pay that much because I wanted the caliber of skill that you would expect to come with that price tag. Now…I wasn’t quite getting that high level of caliber, it was still a huge improvement from the previous two.

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Is This What I Signed Up For

In these conversations, I found out that she was only getting $3,800 of the $8,500. I can understand the need for the company to charge a markup. But she wasn’t even getting half?

Ok. Well, it’s a well known company, they probably have amazing training. Except, she wasn’t really improving. I asked my assistant to give me a list of trainings she’s received since being assigned to me. The list was zero numbers long. Nada. Zilch.

They were taking $4,700 as a premium….per month….and providing nothing of value.

Should this story be this long? A good writer would probably take out a lot of these details. Well, I’m not a good writer and I’m upset about this. One because it violates one of my core values of value exchange. We give more than we get. Two, I thought I was getting a 8,500 assistant, one with the experience and skill that comes with that price tag. Instead I was getting a decent admin with a $3,800 experience and skill at a 8,500 price tag.

To pour salt into my wound, if I wanted her as a full time employee, I would owe $28,000 as part of the contract I signed. So I gave her a slight raise. Bought out the contract, and saved $4,000 per month. Meaning I recouped the $28,000 fee after seven months.

What the heck is my point?

On August 20^th, I’m having a free virtual summit called Run on System, Not Yourself. I have some amazing presenters with busy schedules so six of the eight presentations are pre recorded. This story relates to what Tim Francis shared in his session.

Tim is the founder of the Great Assistant. His team has hired over a thousand executive assistants. But before that great track record, he failed hiring his own assistant five times in a row.

What changed from a zero success rate to thousands of successful hires?

Tim assessed the situation and realized he was half the problem.

That’s why I shared my story. My assistant wasn’t doing a great job and wasn’t improving and I had a lot of fault in that outcome. She didn’t work out. Neither did the previous two. And neither did the one after. Four in a row for me. I have to take responsibility for this failure. Just like Tim realized.

In this summit, Tim goes over the one question he asked that changed his hiring success. And he goes over the proper system of how to delegate.

Tim is one of eight speakers at the Run on Systems Summit, a free one-afternoon virtual event where each speaker teaches the one operating system they’d refuse to run their business without. It airs live Thursday, August 20, from noon to 4pm ET.

Register free at www.takebreaksworkbetter.com/summit.

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I’ll paraphrase how the plant president framed it: “John, I get the breaks thing for someone doing focused work. But my line workers are watching product move down a conveyor. The job is easy. Even if their brain gets tired, they can still do it at a high level, because the role doesn’t demand a high level.”

The car wash owner said basically the same thing except instead of mixing 2 ton bags of sugar like Willy Wonka, they just have to make sure the driver gets their car on the conveyor belt and splash a tablespoon of water on it.

In Take Breaks Work Better, a write that physical work still drains mental reserves. But I did write primarily to service-based businesses and my research included in the book doesn’t directly address their concern.

They both made valid points, and I wanted to see if research supported their position or mine. Maybe I’m wrong. Let’s find out together.

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Easy jobs drain the brain too

Researchers who study sustained attention have a name for what happens when a person has to watch for the same thing over and over: vigilance decrement. A review in Frontiers in Psychology described the pressure as the “maintenance of attention on a relatively mundane or monotonous task.” In plain English, the job is boring, and staying focused on something boring wears the brain down no matter how simple the task is.

This research goes back to World War II, when the British military noticed their radar operators were missing enemy submarine signals toward the end of long watches and asked a psychologist named Norman Mackworth to figure out why. Mackworth built a test that looks a lot like a production line: a clock hand ticking along normally, with a rare double jump the operator had to catch by pressing a button, for two hours straight. Detection dropped 10 to 15 percent in the first half hour and kept falling from there.

Researchers spent the next few decades running versions of that test, and in 1974 a scientist named Teichner reviewed the accumulated studies and found the slide starts even earlier than Mackworth measured. Attention begins slipping within the first fifteen minutes of a monotonous watching task.

Fifteen minutes. A line worker’s shift is eight to ten hours. And these were radar operators looking for enemy submarines, with lives on the line, in wartime. If they couldn’t hold attention on a monotonous screen, the guy watching frozen beverage mix move down a conveyor doesn’t stand a chance.

Shall I lay it on thicker? Three more researchers posted their conclusion in the journal Human Factors that “vigilance requires hard mental work and is stressful.”

Watching cars at a car wash, or umpa lumpa-ing (yes it’s a word) is a vigilance task. A knowledge worker and a line worker are both spending brain fuel.

Boredom’s role in recovery

I have daydreaming and lying down doing nothing as a great break idea. And, the research I uncovered looking into this says boredom causes passive fatigue which drains your brain.

Crap! Maybe I was wrong.

These smart people called researchers that were studying monotonous tasks looked at long highway driving found two kinds of fatigue. Active fatigue which comes from overload, too much demand on the brain at once. Which is what I mostly have addressed because it’s prevalent thanks to hustle culture douchebros. The other one is passive fatigue which comes from underload. Which I have to admit I have not experienced in at least a decade. And that’s why I initially missed it. Underload happens from monotony. Like long highway driving, car wash conveyor belts, or sugar line workers.

My experience fits their research. Driving is easy. Monotonous. And it almost always makes me drowsy. I was not surprised to find in driving simulator studies, passive fatigue impaired alertness and increased crash probability. The brain disengages and that’s when mistakes and accidents happen.

But I’m not wrong either. So here’s the difference.

Boredom is restorative when your brain is free to wander, and draining when your brain wants to wander but the job is requiring focus.

A very applicable confirming study

A study published in Ergonomics in 2001 by Dababneh, Swanson, and Shell tested the idea of adding rest breaks with 30 workers in a meat processing plant. Two schedules were tested, and both added 36 minutes of break time on top of the regular schedule the plant already ran. One schedule gave workers twelve 3-minute breaks spread through the day. The other gave them four 9-minute breaks.

Ok. So that was the setup. What did they find? “Neither of the two experimental rest break schedules had a negative effect on production.”

What this means is the team were given more breaks but production stayed the same. Profit did not decrease and the team reported less physical discomfort, which happens to be something they liked. So job satisfaction increases with no negative effect on cash flow.

That is a win in my book. Same output, less pain, happier team, at a no extra cost.

How I’m updating the 3.3 Rule

And I have another study for you….because hustle culture and the way most of our brains have been wired want to push against this. If you think I’m laying this on pretty thick….well, you’re right. I am.

In PLOS ONE, Patricia Albulescu did a meta-analysis on 22 studies that focused on micro-breaks. They concluded: “micro-breaks are efficient in preserving high levels of vigor and alleviating fatigue.”

They also discovered a nuance. Lower cognitive demand tasks showed “significant gains” with micro breaks. For deep knowledge work, short breaks weren’t enough. Those jobs need longer recovery, which is exactly why the 3.3 Rule scales the break to roughly 30 percent of the work block instead of handing everyone the same five minutes.

But for lower cognitive demand tasks, try a 9 minute break. No need to go for the full 30 percent recovery time.

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How do you feel at the thought of taking a four-week vacation? Do you feel excitement, or is it anxiety? Is it fear? Is it jubilation or consternation? Most business owners are completely terrified at the idea of ignoring their business for an entire month.

was no different. But he set a goal that he was going to take a four-week vacation, and he scheduled it 12 months in advance. That gave him an entire year to prepare for taking a month off. Then he said, “I had a proverbial heart attack the moment I committed to it.”

In my interview with Mike, who will be a presenter for my free virtual Run On Systems Summit on August 20, one of the things we talked about in depth was the four-week vacation.

To many it sounds like a nice luxury. To most it feels impossible and nerve-wracking. But our discussion was about creating a system so that, as a business owner, this is something you can enjoy regularly.

The Password Move

Now if you don’t know Mike, when he does something, he commits. This is one of the most disciplined human beings I have ever met. And he has a battery that is….uncommon. So as part of leaving on his four-week vacation, the first thing he did was ask the president of his company to change his email password and his general login information. He couldn’t check on things while he was out even if he wanted to.

For Mike’s first four-week vacation, he said week one was raw panic. He was pretty confident his business was done for. That by the time he got back it would have imploded, or exploded. Week two, he found himself negotiating with God. “Hey, if you keep running the business, if you make sure it’s okay by the time I get back, I promise I’ll try to be better.” (I’ve known Mike personally for many years, and I’ll just tell you, Mike’s a great guy.) By week three he felt release. It was out of his hands now. He’d done what he could in the 12 months leading up to it. The bed was made, so there wasn’t much point worrying about what was going on. And in week four, he finally enjoyed his vacation.

The List of Broken Things

So what happened afterwards? When he came back, turns out the business didn’t burn to the ground. They added new business while he was out. They invented new products.

Of course, some things did break. And every one of those things that broke had something in common: they depended on Mike.

That list of things that broke becomes a great diagnostic tool. What were the things that depended on Mike? What did they miss in their 12 months of preparation? This allowed them to identified the next things to systematize so the company isn’t reliant on him.

I hope you are thinking about this in context of your own business. A diagnostic tool like that will help your company not be so reliant on you to do everything.

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My Four-Week Vacation

I personally tried the same experiment. I took more than 12 months to prep for it. About 18 months on my end. And it’s all about the system, which Mike talks about specifically in his book Clockwork. You start with a small period first, like a week, and have everyone on the team take notes of:

• things they couldn’t do while you were out

• decisions they felt like they couldn’t make on their own

• things that broke

• things they got stuck on

Then when you get back after that first week, you review the list together and start asking:

• How do we fix these things?

• How do we remove the business owner from being the bottleneck on decisions and fixes?

• How do we empower the team to take more accountability?

• How do we encourage team to make mistakes, and let them know it’s okay when they do?

That’s what we did. It took us a few months to fix the very long list of things we identified during my first week off. Then I was ready to take two weeks off, and we rinsed and repeated the process. Each time the list got smaller and smaller, even though the length of time I was out got longer and longer.

Eventually I could commit to a four-week vacation. And I thought the best way to prove I was no longer the holdup on anything going on in my company (improvement, growth, decisions) was to take those four weeks in my CPA firm between March 15th and April 15th. The busiest four weeks of the year.

And the business thrived. We did the work, we created the systems, and I was able to take a four-week vacation and everything went well. And by everything I mean mostly everything. I did have a handful of tax clients who, at the time, saw me as their primary person. Even though I gave them four months of notice that I’d be taking that time off, they were pretty upset that I wasn’t available. Which served me as a diagnostic tool on what I can fix for next time.

Where to Hear the Rest

This four-week vacation system was one of the things Mike and I talked about in our interview, which will be airing at the Run On Systems Summit on August 20th, from noon to 4 p.m. Eastern Time. It’s free, it’s virtual.

And a little teaser for you. He explained to me what the number one job of an entrepreneur is. You’ll need to tune in to hear his answer. I hope it’s interesting enough for you to pop in and register for this free event, because you’ll walk away with at least eight implementable systems that can help you reach your goals in a way that sustains work-life harmony.

Register at www.takebreaksworkbetter.com/summit

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She is the author of the book ThoughtLoad.

Workload versus ThoughtLoad

We’re familiar with the term “workload.” The volume of tasks and outputs and meetings that we are responsible for. And when our workload is high, it’s easy for us to feel tired, burnt out, exhausted. So at least we’re not confused when that happens.

ThoughtLoad is all of the workload stuff plus all the other things. It’s the notifications on your phone. It’s the interruptions from internal team member communication. It’s that difficult conversation you just had and you don’t really love how it went. It’s the decisions that you’ve postponed or procrastinated.

Dr. Davey calls this an invisible tax on your performance. And naturally, being a CPA who is very open about how much the IRS sucks, I want to reduce taxes.

Dr. Davey has a formula for ThoughtLoad, and this is how it goes: cognitive demands plus emotional burdens over your energy reserves.

So if our cognitive demands increase, that increases our ThoughtLoad. If our emotional burdens increase, that increases our ThoughtLoad. If our energy reserves are depleted or decrease, that also increases our ThoughtLoad. Meaning, our cognitive demands and our emotional burdens could stay the same, but if our energy reserves don’t get refilled, our ThoughtLoad increases.

I love this formula because obviously it plays well into the 3.3 Rule, which is all about restorative breaks. Which happen to refill our energy reserves. This means if our energy reserves increase and things didn’t change with our cognitive demands or emotional burdens, then our ThoughtLoad decreases. And if you followed the tax example, we just decreased it. You’re welcome!

I really loved Dr. Davey’s book and our entire conversation because they highlight how we can get burnt out even if our workload isn’t crazy, due to cognitive demands, emotional burdens, and energy reserves and how those three things play with each other.

What Gets in The Way

She told me most people she works with spend only 10 to 20% of their time focused on the most important things. The rest of the time goes to other people’s priorities and what she calls side quests. And of course the report that gets put together even though nobody looks at it or is ever going to use it.

Do More Nothing

My favorite chapter of her book, the one I made sure to ask her about, was titled “Do More Nothing.”

She got the idea about doing more nothing when she was watching a documentary about bread. Obviously you can see the connection between doing more nothing and bread, so I don’t even know if I need to explain this.

The documentary made a point that you could eat all the flour in the world and drink all the water, but you’d still starve. However, if you mix flour and water and expose them to air and bake them into bread, you can live on it forever.

When she heard that, she compared this situation to her brain. Her brain was a pantry with no air in it, no space. She had stuff from research, conversations, ideas. But without the air, the space of doing nothing (that’s what she’s equating air to), there is no nourishment.

So “do more nothing” is exactly what it says. Nothing. Do nothing. Just do that more often. No podcast, no music, no phone, no input into your brain. She says it’s preferable that you do this nothing while taking a walk.

What I love is that her ThoughtLoad book and concepts, especially Do More Nothing, are so connected to the 3.3 Rule and the importance of recovery breaks. We both reached the same conclusion coming at it from different angles. This is yet another proof of the 3.3 Rule. She obviously goes way deeper in the book and in our interview. So check those out!

Where to watch the full interview

This interview will be played during the free, virtual Run on Systems Summit on August 20 from noon to 4pm ET. Each interview with world-class experts covers one system that can transform your business. If you missed my article about my interview with Michael Bungay Stanier who is also part of the summit, check that out too.

This is a must-attend, and we made it a no-brainer by making it free.

Register at www.takebreaksworkbetter.com/summit.

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, author of The Coaching Habit, calls the thing that does this your advice monster. It’s the voice that looms up the second another person starts talking and says, “I’m going to add value to this conversation.” I sat down with Michael a few weeks ago to record his session for the Run on Systems Summit, and I’ve been thinking about that monster ever since.

The Coaching Habit turns ten this year, has sold more than 1 million copies, and it’s been in my world for a long time. We read it as a company years ago, and went deep on it with our managers. I keep a card on my desk with his seven coaching habit questions printed on it, and when I feel my advice monster warming up in a meeting, I pull out the card and try to do better.

Michael’s whole challenge fits in two lines. Can you stay curious a little bit longer? Can you rush to advice a little more slowly?

His case against fast advice comes down to three costs, and I recognized all three because I’ve been guilty of it many times.

First cost: your advice is usually aimed at the wrong problem. The first challenge somebody describes is almost never the real challenge. It’s their best guess, their stab in the dark. So when you jump in with a solution, you’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist because you didn’t let the real one come to the surface. But at least everybody feels productive.

Second cost: you train your team to stop thinking. After all, why should they think through the problem when they know they can come to you and get the answer. So they come back next week, and the week after that, and eventually you’re the bottleneck for all the decisions. And by “you”, I mean me. I did this for too long.

Third cost: your advice monster doesn’t just hang out in a work environment. It can follow you home too. Your spouse, your friends, your kids. None of them want your solutions as much as you think they do. What they want is to be heard, to be encouraged, and to figure some of it out themselves.

I told Michael that I’m the worst at this with my kids. As a parent, I’ve lived many of their experiences. I’ve made mistakes I’d love for them to avoid. So naturally I have a plethora of answers. Just giving them answers doesn’t seem to work though. The few times I asked them questions, stayed curious, and tried to help them determine their own solution, the improved behaviors stick.

So how do you stay curious with this advice monster waiting ever so impatiently? You have a system of better questions ready to go before the conversation starts. Michael has spent years figuring out which questions work, and in his summit session he walks through all seven. That includes the one he calls the best coaching question in the world (it’s three words), the exact script for when someone asks you “how do I…..”He also breaks down the three types of advice monsters, because which one showed up needs a different approach to tame it.

In our conversation, Michael showed how adding a single word to one of his questions changes the quality of the answer you get back.

The Run on Systems Summit is a free one-day virtual event on Thursday, August 20, from noon to 4 p.m. ET. Michael’s session sits alongside Mike Michalowicz, Kelly Roach, Joey Coleman, and more, all pointed at one promise: install the operating systems that let your business run without you. It’s live, it’s free, and it only happens once, so grab your seat at www.takebreaksworkbetter.com/summit.

Stay curious.

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Whether I was sitting in a multimillion dollar negotiation or a five minute feedback conversation with a team member, be clear. This isn’t permission to be rude. Clear and rude are not the same thing.

Before I get into lessons learned in June, I’d like you to consider what one decent or even mediocre business idea is worth to you. I think my stuff here’s pretty good, but maybe to you it’s meh. Well, what’s a meh idea worth to you? If one line in here saves you from a bad contract, a bad hire, or a year of tolerating something you shouldn’t, what is that worth? The annual fee for this is $150. I write this because it’s good for me to reflect on what happened last month. But I also believe in value exchange. If you don’t get one idea worth more than $1,000 over the course of 12 months, I’ll refund your $150. I believe in the value that much.

If you’ve been reading my updates, you know I decided to wind down our relationship with a sales vendor that sold 80%+ of our new clients.

I’ll keep this one short because the past months have a lot more detail.

We had seven separate conversations about what a peaceful separation looks like. I told them what I’d agree to and what I wouldn’t. Then they sent over a written document, and it looked nothing like the seven conversations we just had. It went well past anything we discussed. Clear is kind. I understand why they wouldn’t want me to know their strategy, but because of how they handled this, it now makes any future verbal conversation meaningless because what they put in a legal contract, for the last three years, has never matched those verbal conversations.

There is a strange silver lining. Now that they’ve finally put their thinking on paper, I know exactly how they see this, and that gives me a much better direction than any vague, friendly conversation ever did. In a negotiation you cannot trust that the other side is telling you everything. That is the whole reason getting it in writing matters. The document is the truth when in comes to business partnerships, vendor contracts, and client contracts.

The mixed message

Last month I wrote a lot about accountability. This month I want to zoom in on one specific way a well-intentioned manager undercuts it without meaning to.

One of our supervisors is a natural cheerleader. This is a good characteristic. You want people on your team who get others excited, who make a team member feel believed in, who lead with encouragement.

The problem shows up in the feedback conversation. An encourager delivers a correction like this. “Hey, we really need you to improve this. But we know you’re trying your best. You’re doing a great job. We just need you to fix this one thing.”

Put yourself in that team members shoes. What did the team member actually hear? They heard “you’re doing a great job.” The correction got buried under so much cushion that the person walks away thinking everything is fine. A month later nothing has changed, everyone is frustrated, and the team member is confused, because in their mind you told them they were doing great.

You can be warm and still be clear. You can tell someone you believe in them, and then tell them plainly what has to change, without wrapping the second part in so much bubble wrap that it disappears. Say the encouraging thing. Say the corrective thing. Keep them separate so it’s clear. Don’t mix the messages.

Everything past this line is the part I only share here. What I found when I looked closer at a department head who left, the policies she left behind that were quietly hurting us, the expensive hire I decided to make anyway, and the honest math on why. If you’re not ready to upgrade yet, no hard feelings. The two lessons above stand on their own. Come back when the gap between what people say and what they actually do starts costing you real money.

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May was the month I admitted to myself how much I had been tolerating. I’d love to know if you can relate or is this just a me problem. I have gathered, maybe to the extent of hoarding, a lot of “to-do’s”. So that even in the white spaces of recovery that I enjoy because of the 3.3 Rule, it would be impossible to get to all the things that needed my attention. One of those being proper quality review of team members and the work they should be doing. Hence….tolerating.

It wasn’t the big dramatic stuff. Those things tend to get addressed. It was a hundred little things I had let slide for long enough that letting them slide had quietly become the culture for new-ish team members that didn’t know any different, and allowing it to become a bad habit for longer term team members.

Note: there are no positive outcomes of tolerating low quality or letting team members work with no accountability. None.

So step 1 was admitting I had tolerated things I shouldn’t have. Step 2 was taking action to fix it. If your team has become comfortable with not having to work hard, work focused, or produce work to a high standard, stuff can hit the fan once you hold them accountable to that; once you stop tolerating anything less than that.

This month, I’m going to show you what this looked like at Incite.

It’s important to note that I know I have responsibility in letting team members get away with no executing. But that doesn’t mean I have to sit back and never correct it. At the end of the day, I’m accountable to the success of the business. And responsible team members, accountable to their job description, is a key to business success.

Quick side tangent: Do the math on what one decent business idea is worth to you. If you get one actionable idea from this post, could that be worth thousands to your business?

One reframe of something you already understood. One mistake you avoid because you watched me make it first. If a single line in here changes how you run your team, your money, or your day, is the annual fee of $150 worth it? That’s why I’m writing this; for you to get that value.

Okay. Onto the month.

The Sales Vendor Update

Last month I told you I was killing the goose. Our largest sales vendor, eighty percent of our revenue, and I told them I wanted to unwind the relationship.

Here is where it stood at the end of May. We have had several conversations with them since, and they have all stayed peaceful. They have verbally agreed to the wind-down framework I proposed. They want some flexibility in the contract in case they change their model down the road, which is fair, and I am not going to force anyone to keep doing something they do not want to do.

One more thing worth adding to the April version of this story. When we ran the numbers on these specific clients, some of our calculations suggest we may have been losing money on them. So the goose I have been so nervous about killing might not have been laying golden eggs at all. I am still working through that math because there are still signs that we had some profit.

More on this as it resolves. I still do not trust anything, and neither should you, until I see what they actually send me to sign.

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I don’t believe there is a magic formula but there is certainly a framework and foundational things necessary to do it.

I want to start with what I think most people imagine when they consider scaling processes. A giant binder with standard operating procedures (SOP)…aka processes. And here’s me being a buzz kill…..it’s not that simple.

If it were, everyone who’s signed up for Alex Hormozi’s scaling lead magnet would be scaling.

I’m also pretty confident you don’t really want that SOP binder from me. (That being said, if I get enough requests, I’ll think about it 😊)

In my experience, those that want to scale, but aren’t, you’re usually stuck somewhere specific. Underneath the question, you’ve probably got a few deeper concerns you already suspect a binder of documented processes isn’t going to fix.

Before I go further, one caveat. If you already know you don’t want a big team, go read what I wrote last time. My belief is that the freedoms you wanted when you started your business (time freedom, money freedom, freedom from stress) usually require a team to pull off. It is completely fine if that’s not what you’re building. If you want a business that works for you and only you, content at $75,000, $100,000, $200,000 a year, or you’ve figured out how to run solo all the way to a million and you’re happy with a lifestyle business that won’t have much exit value someday, good. You can totally do that and I hope my content can still add value to you. Last time’s article addresses that. This one is for the person who wants to scale.

Back to that binder of documented processes. I wish it were that easy. Don’t get me wrong though, you 100% need documented processes. But they won’t be perfect the first time, and they will need consistent updates. Because as your business changes, so will those processes.

Even now, with almost three hundred team members and multiple eight figures in revenue, we are still building this. Over the last six years we’ve put thousands of hours into our training system. We record videos. We build quizzes for the videos. We run them through Adobe’s learning management software so we can track who has watched what and assign specific training to specific people. My admin team doesn’t need to know how to file a 2553 S election, and my sales rep doesn’t need to know how to organize tax documents, so they don’t get sent trainings they’ll never use.

We run weekly trainings inside each department. And we still had team members, as recent as today, tell us that they don’t feel like we’re doing enough on training.

So a system that keeps you on top of training is itself a documented process. The thing that keeps your other processes alive is a process too. These are foundational elements of scaling.

There’s a guy I keep seeing online whose company teaches owners how to scale, and his framework runs from a hundred thousand dollars in revenue all the way to a billion plus. I don’t have a billion-dollar company. I’ve never run one, so I won’t pretend to teach you that part. What I have done is take a company up to $30 million, and I can tell you stages exist at different revenue sizes.

What worked when it was just me at around $300,000 in revenue probably could have carried me to $500,000. By a million, I had to add people, and even that small jump changed things. From $1 million to $3 million, the systems held. By $3 million, I could feel them straining. Getting to $5 million meant rebuilding pieces and looking at the business from a different angle. Same thing happened at $10 million. Again at $20 million. Now we’re setting our sights on what $100 million looks like, and that’s making us look at everything differently again.

Every time, the org chart changes. You add layers of management as you grow, and the moment you add a layer, some of your processes change by default, because the work now flows through different people. You also have to give up control over knowing every single thing. Past a certain size, you will not know everything happening in your company, and you have to be okay with that.

That’s the real reason a binder will never be enough. Documented processes are necessary. You cannot scale without them. But there are other elements much more important and a lot of is happening in your head space.

Let me address common questions that people who want to scale have, whether they’ve realized it or not.

Will growing just mean more hours and more stress?

Right now, at the level you’re running, things already feel chaotic. You feel like you’re doing too much and there’s never enough time. So when you imagine doubling the business, you do the natural math: I’m going from $250,000 to $500,000, I just doubled my revenue, so I’m about to double my headaches.

While I too believed that, my experience in scaling has been the opposite.

The only way to keep growing and still handle all the things is to add people. And here’s what adding people does: each new person becomes responsible for a much smaller and more specific slice of what you’re carrying alone right now. Every slice they pick up is a slice that comes off your plate.

I’m not talking about abdication. I’m talking about delegation, and those are very different things. Delegation means ongoing communication, reviewing their work, making sure they actually know how to do the thing, and staying on top of quality. It is not handing someone a responsibility, saying “hope it works out,” and never thinking about it again. You have to build in real time to train them and for reviewing their work.

As I added people and responsibilities came off my plate, the total number of challenges I deal with hasn’t really decreased. But it hasn’t grown either. I’m carrying about the same load of stress I carried at $500,000 in revenue, except now the company is many times bigger. If we were talking to each other in person, I’d say that really slow and give you that look, “Do you hear what I’m saying!?!” So read it again. My stress load hasn’t increased, but the company is tens of millions in revenue larger. Same stress, a lot more revenue. As a nerdy accountant, I saying I increased my revenue per unit of stress, and that’s the trade you have available to you too.

The challenges are not the same. Those change. Part of scaling is developing roles that didn’t exist within your company before. You’re probably living in what Michael Gerber in The E-Myth calls the technician role. You had an entrepreneurial seizure, went out on your own, and now you do most of the service work yourself. I did too. First, I did all of it. Then I brought in people to help me do it. Then I handed pieces of it off completely to people who were qualified to own them. Eventually I took all of the technician work off my plate. My time now goes to supporting the team, growing the organization, and casting the vision. A few things still only I can do. The technician work isn’t one of them anymore. You’ll go through a similar transition as you scale.

Scaling doesn’t happen as a light switch where you’re doing everything on Monday and nothing on Tuesday. You work toward the handoff one responsibility at a time.

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How do I grow without becoming the firm I hate?

I get this one. I feel it too.

Almost every one of us has some other company that serves as the anti-example, the thing we point at and say “never that.” For me, in accounting, the anti-example is the Big Four. For you it might be a competitor, someone you met once in a networking group, someone in your space you’ve never met but everyone seems to know, the doucheprenuer inundating social media, or the firm whose former clients keep landing on your doorstep with horror stories. We’ve all got one.

And we’ve all been on the other end of it as customers. The big company that made you feel like a number. The sense that nobody there knew your name or cared to. You’ve lived it, which is exactly why you’re worried about becoming it. You’re a good-hearted person, and you don’t want anyone ever feeling that way about you. So the quiet logic kicks in: if I just don’t grow, I’ll never get big enough for that to happen.

Picture a spectrum. On one end, the small boutique firm where everyone knows every client by name because the client list is short and the handholding is part of the charm. On the other end, the Fortune 100 machine that could not tell you who you are, run by people who were handed a checklist, and the checklist rarely includes “act like a human.”

Here’s where intention comes in. As you scale, you build a hiring process that screens for people who believe in taking care of clients the way you do. You become the vision caster for that standard, and you can absolutely train good people to care about clients the way you care. Now, nobody will ever care about the business as much as you do, because nobody else has your upside. But, you can still find people who genuinely believe in treating customers well, and they’ll deliver it as well as you would.

I want to tell you something I’d rather you hear from me than discover the hard way. As we’ve grown, we have had to take on some of the very bureaucracy I dislike about my industry’s anti-examples. Not because I went soft. Because of size. Once you push past fifty employees and then past a hundred, the labor laws you’re subject to change, and the bigger you get, the more scrutiny comes with it. I know some people that have chosen to not grow past 49 employees because of this.

Here’s an example most small business owners never think about. I certainly didn’t. Should you pay your employee an hourly rate or salary? Most aren’t doing this correctly. A few years ago we brought in an HR law firm to review what we were doing, and the finding was that a bunch of our salaried people legally needed to be hourly. I was annoyed about it. I’d rather pay a salary, it feels more fair to me, and in most cases the team members wanted the salary, not the hourly arrangement. Labor law didn’t care what either of us preferred. If I didn’t make the change, I could be sued, and a lawsuit like that can put the whole business at risk. I asked the attorney how this is even a thing if nobody seems to follow it. He said it’s like the speed limit. The limit exists. It doesn’t stop people from speeding. Of course he would use the speeding example given my predisposition to drive fast. A small business can speed and usually get away with it. A bigger company with a lot more team members gets pulled over.

We’ve also had some genuinely wild claims thrown at us by former team members. So we’ve had to build protections into our employee agreement and our handbook, and I hate that we have to. I would love to just trust that people are good and operate on that assumption all the time. You should operate that way as much as you possibly can. When you’re carrying real legal exposure though, which a growing company always is, you have to protect yourself, and that protection usually means fewer one-off exceptions for individual people than you’d like to give.

One more, because most owners don’t see it coming. If you offer maternity leave and don’t offer the same paternity leave, the law calls that discrimination, even though I’ve never once met a new father who expected the same amount of time off as the wife who actually delivered the baby.

So, how do you grow without becoming the firm you hate? It comes down to intention, and intention is entirely in your control. You can grow on purpose, in a way that never turns you into the company you point at and say “never that.” Some of the bureaucracy is unavoidable as you get bigger. But avoiding being heartless very much is avoidable.

How do I get out of the middle of everything?

This is another one that’s really about mindset. Do me a favor and pull the emotion out of it for a second. Pretend a friend comes to you and says, “Man, I just don’t know how to get out of the middle of everything.” Be honest with your friend. You kind of already know the answer.

What are you doing right now that someone else could do? Hand it to them. Train them to do it. That’s it. That’s how you get out of the middle.

I know it doesn’t feel that simple, and I know why. We’re all carrying a little PTSD…or a lot PTSD. You hired the warm body once, without a real hiring process, and they didn’t have the skills, and they let you down. Or you hired the right person with the right skills, but you abdicated instead of delegating, turned them loose with no guidance, and they didn’t do well because you didn’t set them up to. Maybe you were that employee somewhere, dropped into a job with no real training and then blamed for not nailing it, sitting there thinking, “I’m doing the best I can with what you gave me.” Every one of those experiences makes us flinch at the idea of not being involved in everything.

And then there’s the money. Ok, I accept I can train someone to do the things I’m in the middle of. How do I pay for this person though? If you’re living paycheck to paycheck as an owner, or floating the business and your personal life on credit cards because there isn’t enough revenue yet, of course your brain says “I can’t afford to hire anybody.” Which drops you right back into the middle of everything.

So it simple: you hand the work to someone else. The catch is you have to be able to pay them. Which means scaling runs on two tracks at once, training and cash flow.

Getting your cash flow right starts with two questions you’ve probably been too busy to sit with. First, your pricing. Are you charging enough? A lot of owners aren’t, and they’ve never stopped long enough to find out. Second, your expenses. Keith Cunningham taught me in one of his books a clean filter for this in his work: every expense should be helping you get clients or keep clients. If an expense isn’t doing one of those two jobs, ask yourself why you’re still paying for it. What is it there for? Could you defend it out loud? Most owners are so buried that they never audit their expenses, so instead of cutting, they keep adding. New problem, new tool, new subscription, let’s bolt it on. Half the time the fix was to cut something. The other side of the coin, they’re paying for a tool they never learned to use, and if they learned it, they could charge more, serve more clients, or get enough efficiency to take on more work.

That last point leads into capacity, which is its own lever. How many units of your service can you deliver with the labor hours you have? Once you know that number, the next question is how to shrink the time each unit takes. Every minute you save there is capacity you get back, and capacity is just more clients and more revenue on the same expense base you already have.

Understanding capacity and cash flow are foundational elements of scaling.

So, how do you get out of the middle of everything? You train someone to do what you’re doing, and you build the cash flow to pay them. Almost every piece of what I just described has an entire book written about it. Let me know if you need book recommendations and I can give you some.

Is this even possible for someone like me?

I watched people hit this wall in real time once. We brought on a strategic relationship with a sales organization that started sending us new clients, and when I say a lot of clients, I mean a lot. The next time I ran into people who knew us, the reaction was, “Wait, how big did you get? How many people do you have now?” And you could see the next thought forming behind their eyes: that’s a unicorn, that’s not repeatable, I could never do that.

A few honest responses to that.

Not everyone wants what we did, and that’s fine. I don’t even necessarily recommend growing at the speed we grew. That pace created a pile of stress we probably could have avoided if we’d controlled it better.

If you do want to grow, the ceiling you’re bumping into is one you built. “Is this even possible for someone like me?” is a question about your own psychology before it’s a question about your business. Do the mindset work first, get yourself to “this is possible for me,” and then you can ask the question that matters: it’s possible, but do I want it?

Plenty of people want it, and those are the people I’m writing this for. If you read all of this and decide you don’t want it, I hope you still walked away with a few things worth using.

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Okay, so what do I do first?

I’m not sure that’s even the right question. The hope buried inside it is “just give me the magic bullet, the exact formula,” and I don’t believe there’s an exact formula. There are frameworks, which I’ve been sharing here with you. Depending on where you’re standing right now, the smart first move for you might be a different starting point than it would be for someone else trying to scale.

But I can tell you what I did, in order.

The first thing was hiring one person. I handed them a few responsibilities I wasn’t struggling finding time for, which freed up my time. The tasks I gave away first weren’t revenue generators, so the time I got back went straight into revenue-generating work. To hand those tasks off well, that person needed training, which meant we had to document the process so they could follow it the same way every time.

Then I hired the next person and ran the same play. “Here’s what you’ll own. Let’s document it together. And I’ll block off regular time to sit with you, review the work, and answer your questions.” That’s when I added one-on-ones.

Eventually you’ve got enough people that a real team meeting makes sense. “Hey, everyone, let’s get together for a few minutes and talk through some things.” One warning: most companies run way too many meetings. Don’t call a blanket team meeting just to have one, especially when you’re small. Keep it to fifteen or twenty minutes and make it genuinely worth their time. If it isn’t worth their time, you’re literally losing money, because you’re paying everyone in the room to sit through something that gave them nothing.

As we got bigger, we added quick daily huddles. Stand-ups. “What are you working on today? Does anyone need something from this person that’s different from what they had planned?” Any fires that we need to put out today?

The whole time, you’re documenting processes. And you’re revisiting job descriptions, because as you add people, responsibilities shift, and every team member deserves to know exactly what winning at their job looks like. That clarity lives in a well-written job description, plus the teaching and reviewing that back it up.

At some point you look up and realize you need systems for your people, systems for your cash flow, systems for clients and service delivery, and yes, a system to keep your systems current. More people means more collective brainpower in the building, so part of scaling our processes is asking the team for their ideas. Not every idea is good. You want to hear them anyway, and you want people to feel appreciated for offering, even the bad ones, so they keep bringing you the good ones.

Which is a good spot for some self-awareness on my part. I have a terrible poker face. There have been plenty of moments where I’m biting my tongue and my face is busy betraying me, and the person can tell I wasn’t thrilled with what they shared. That’s a flaw I’m still working on, because the best practice is to be grateful they were willing to share. You genuinely want the feedback.

For us, all of this took three to four years of deliberate effort before the systems were solid. And that groundwork is the only reason that, when an opportunity to add a sales engine bigger than anything I’d ever seen landed on my desk, we could say yes and grow into it instead of collapsing under it. The company that sales organization had been sending leads to before us? They went out of business because they lacked systems, and good training.

Once you have the foundational elements of scaling, that’s when you focus on increasing sales. If you increase sales before you’re ready, you can grow yourself out of business, or you simply will lose the clients as fast as you get them because your structure can’t support the load.

People want this to be more complicated than it is, usually because they don’t know how to do it yet, it makes them uncomfortable, or they’ve got some personal beliefs to work through first. The mechanics are pretty simple. The hard part is everything in between: the drama, keeping people on the same page, reminding them over and over why you’re doing what you’re doing, and asking constantly, “How can I make your job easier?” You won’t always be able to. Asking anyway is how you find out when you can.

So that’s the honest answer to “what are your scaling processes.” It’s a series of deliberate handoffs, paid for by cash flow you manage, protected by hiring that screens for your standards, and held together by documented processes you keep updating because the business refuses to sit still. Done with enough intention that you grow into the company you wanted instead of the one you swore you’d never become.

It has been fun. It has been exciting. It has been hard. And it’s been totally worth it.

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I think he’s wrong about that. And here’s something it took me too long to learn: you can admire someone, follow most of their advice, and still disagree with them when their values don’t match yours.

You don’t owe anyone a hundred-million-dollar empire. Not ten million, not one million, not a vision big enough to impress a stranger online. A small, simple, profitable business that funds the life you want is a real dream. Full stop.

So when people say you can’t grow a business without a team, I get why it stings. It sounds like one more voice telling you your version doesn’t count unless it’s enormous.

What I believe is simpler. A team gives you your best shot at the three freedoms I care about most: time freedom, money freedom, and mental freedom (I sometimes call that last one stress freedom). You can make good money on your own. Plenty of people do. But carrying the whole thing alone, forever, is how you end up with a business that owns you. You become the bottleneck for everything, no backup, the pressure sitting on you every single day. Get sick, sit through your kid’s dance recital, take a quiet Tuesday off, and the whole machine stops.

I just got back from two weeks in China with my family and it took me less than three hours to catch up on things I needed to do while I was out because I have team. But I also lived the solopreneur life.

So, I’m speaking from experience. Years ago, when it was just me, if you’d told me I’d run a firm of almost three hundred people, I’d have pictured three hundred new headaches. The opposite happened. With no team, the work piles up the second you step away, and your vacation gets interrupted whether you answer the phone or not. Add one person and you have a buffer. Add a real team and everyone covers for everyone, the load spreads, and you find people who do the work you hate better than you ever did.

My first hire ever started with one assistant. Eventually, as in years later, I handed off tax returns completely. I love tax returns, the puzzle of them. My team does them better than I do. (Humbling yes. But it’s ok because my ego survived.) Walking away from that work raised the quality and gave me back my time for the things only I can do.

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That’s the payoff when you build a team well: better work and more of your life. Here are three principles that get you there.

Train people on purpose

Boring, I know, and a real time commitment to set up, which is why most people skip it. Training is done in phases.

Onboarding is phase one: a deliberate, systemized program with intentional shadow time, not “follow Susan for a week.” This is critical time for your new team members because they know nothing about your culture and how you want things done. And they’ll never know unless you take the time to give them proper training.

Phase two is the part almost nobody runs. Ninety days or six months in (depending on job complexity), you have them redo the onboarding taining, because the first pass was a firehose and very little stuck. After real reps, the second pass holds.

Then keep it going: new material, reminders, and vision casting (a phrase, she’s worth subscribing too) that ties people back to why the business exists and how they contribute to the overall business purpose. It’s also important to note that you need to keep the training itself current. Teaching last year’s out dated processes is no bueno.

Get out of the way

said something close to this: eighty percent done well by someone else is a hundred percent awesome. Being the only person who can do a thing is a bottleneck on your whole company.

For almost everything I’m good at, I’ve found someone better. I’m guessing the same may hold true for you. When you hand the work off, do it with systems attached so the quality of your service holds.

Delegating without a system is just hoping, and hoping is abdication.

Here’s how to figure out what to delegate: Run a time audit first. When we did, we discovered our tax pros were losing thirty percent of their day doing things that had nothing to do with taxes. We moved it to people who were great at those other things, freeing up the tax pros times to do the tax pro things. The same team, same hours, and better profit.

Protect what’s only yours

No one cares about your business the way you do. Some work needs the founder’s hands, and you’ll feel it if you give those pieces away.

Using the same time tracking audit data: offload the cheapest-to-replace tasks first, and the high-value, founder-level work rises to the top. I recommend running this time tracking audit quarterly for a year, because clearing your plate takes a few cycles. And things tend to want to creep back on your plate.

In summary: Build the training. Get out of the way. Protect the work that’s yours.

You still don’t have to dream big. But if you want the time, the money, and the peace to enjoy any of it, you’ll want good people in the good fight with you.

If you want the full playbook for building something that runs without you buried inside it, that’s my book, Take Breaks, Work Better. Preorder here before September 15 and you’ll get a bonus stack worth a couple hundred dollars.

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The post I saw from a very well known influencer: “You hired professionals, not children. Focus on outcomes, not clock-watching.”

It went semi-viral. One group of comments sounded like this. “I wish I worked for you.” “My company hounds me all day.” “Tell my boss.” Which makes sense. The post hit on something they felt as overworked employees.

There were also comments that sounded like this. “I wish my team didn’t behave like children though.” “You make it sound so easy that everyone you hire is a professional.” “If I don’t watch their clock they won’t do anything and there are no results.”

Both sides feel real to the people writing them. Both sides are also doing the same thing, which is reacting in absolutes.

Social media has trained us into a habit. Absolutely agree, or absolutely disagree. No middle ground. The algorithm rewards strong reactions, so strong reactions are what we produce. We’ve been turned into extreme response monkeys, and we don’t even notice we’re doing it anymore.

About that post…I want to walk through the parts I agree with, the parts I don’t, and the parts I think are missing. Because viral content tends to traffic in absolutes, and absolutes are almost never how real businesses work.

I’d love it if more people did this with content they see online. Including mine. Don’t agree with somebody because they have a big follower count, or because they wrote a book, or because the post got fifty thousand likes. Read it. Ponder it. Ask whether it fits your business, your team, your situation. Then decide.

“You hired professionals, not children. Focus on outcomes, not clock-watching.”

The advice in that post lives on a spectrum. At one end is pure clock-watching, where you’re standing over their shoulder asking why the work isn’t done. At the other end is pure outcome-only thinking, where you have no idea how long anything takes or what it costs you to produce. Both extremes are wrong. The right answer for most businesses is somewhere in the middle, and where exactly in the middle depends on the role, the team, and the work. The viral version of the post picks one end of the spectrum and treats it as the whole answer. If you think that’s a problem too….let me hear it in the comments.

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What I agree with

I agree that outcomes and impact are important. After all, I wrote a book that has it in the subtitle. Take Breaks, Work Better: Measure Impact, Not Hours, and Transform Your Profitability. Hours by themselves are a lousy scoreboard. For example, accounting industry standard during tax season is fifty-five hours a week minimum. At Incite Tax we average forty-two. A lot fewer hours. We must not be as successful right? Well, we grew almost five hundred percent in the years that followed our decrease in hours. Why? Because we focused on the impact of the hours. To do that, we created better systems, better metrics, and better recovery.

Focusing on outcomes matters. While working overtime is not a virtue.

I’d also add a piece the original post skipped. Outcomes are not just “did the work get done.” Outcomes include the cost of getting the work done. A tax return that should take two hours but instead took five is still a completed return. The outcome for both returns look the same on a checklist. But the cost of getting each done was different.

Which brings me to the part where I disagree.

What I disagree with

The clock-watching part. The post treats it like one thing. There are actually two very different things going on.

On one hand, clock-watching as surveillance is bad. Standing over a designer’s shoulder asking why the logo isn’t done is bad. Pinging a developer every twenty minutes to “check in” is bad. Creating a spiff for most hours worked is bad. So I’m with the influencer on all of that.

Yet, tracking time as data is a completely different activity. The post doesn’t distinguish that, and it really should.

Here’s the difference. At Incite, for example, we track how long a client’s bookkeeping takes. I’m not going to say, “and it’s not that we don’t trust our team.” We have team we trust very much. And we 100% have team that has broken that trust and have done nothing to try to earn it back. If that sounds harsh, let me hear it.

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One of the main reasons we track time is to know whether the process is working. If the bookkeeping return should take two hours and Lynn knocks it out in two, the system is doing what it’s supposed to. If the same bookkeeping takes Sarah five hours, that’s something we need to know for the health of the business. Maybe the software is slow. Maybe we onboarded the client poorly. Maybe Sarah needs training in a specific area. Maybe the workflow has a step nobody is admitting is broken. Maybe the client did something that caused the extra hours, and maybe Sarah was just being lazy.

Without the hours tracking, the clock-tracking, we’d never know.

This is a foundational business principle. Think about an agency. A designer who burns thirty hours on a logo that was budgeted for eight is not delivering a very good outcome. Same with a dev shop that quotes a sprint at two weeks and consistently delivers in five. Same with a copywriter who scopes a project at twelve hours and bills sixty. All outcomes that without clock-tracking could be misconstrued as a good outcome. And depending on how long that goes on for, without the clock-tracking that the post so poignantly declared is wrong, business can cease to exist.

If you’re working harder every year and making less, this is possibly what’s happening. Buried in the gap between scoped hours and actual hours. Visible only if someone is willing to track them.

Hours are inputs. Outcomes are outputs. And measuring impact, like I talk about in my book, requires tracking the inputs that created the outputs. You need both to run a profitable business. Look at hours and outcomes together and you start to see scope creep that’s killing your margins. Pricing that’s been wrong for two years. A team member who needs coaching. A process step that should be deleted. None of that is visible if you only look at outcomes.

The post wants you to pick a side. Its sounds really catchy and coming from the person who posted it, unquestionable by many who read it. But the honest answer is we need both. Measure outcomes. Track the time it took to produce them. And your business will improve.

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The other thing missing from the post

The whole thing rests on the assumption that everyone you hired is, in fact, a professional. And that every professional behaves like one all the time.

That assumption is doing a lot of work that the post never acknowledges. It’s also what the owners in the comments were reacting to because they’ve had real life experience.

I’ve had Anne. First warm body, hired out of desperation, cost me three times her salary in fixes. I’ve had Earl. Nice guy. Funny guy. Got nothing done. (And yes….I kept him too long.) These weren’t bad people. They were people I hired badly or kept past the point I should have. The post assumes those people don’t exist on your team. They might.

There are also the in-between cases. A great hire going through a learning curve who looks like an underperformer for three weeks until they’re back to full speed (that was Lisa). A high performer with focus fatigue who needs structure and recovery, not a lecture. A team member in the wrong role doing their best work in the wrong job.

So before you nod at “you hired professionals, not children,” ask the harder question. Did you hire well? And when someone isn’t performing, do you know which one of those situations you’re in?

The framing in the post is “trust your people, get out of their way.” That’s a reasonable default. That’s where we start with every new team member. And then experience happens and we move from default to lived experience.

When someone is genuinely underperforming though, the answer is not to keep getting out of their way and hope it resolves. The answer is to figure out what’s actually going on. Sometimes it’s focus fatigue and the fix is structure. Sometimes it’s the wrong role and the fix is a conversation. Sometimes it’s a motivation problem that no amount of patience changes.

In every one of those cases, you owe the person a real shot before you decide. Coach them. Train them. Give them clear expectations, clear data on where they’re falling short, and the opportunity to improve. Document the conversations. Extend grace before you make a final call. The bad version of “fire fast” produces a team that doesn’t trust you. The good version, what I call “fire thoughtfully,” produces a team that does, because they see real accountability and real fairness operating side by side.

The whole thing starts at hiring. Hire thoroughly, not slowly. Slow hiring loses the best candidates because the best candidates have options. Thorough hiring, on the other hand, filters quickly, and gives the right people a great experience even when they don’t get the job.

A good hiring process is what makes “trust your team to deliver outcomes” have a chance at working.

The honest version of the post

If I were rewriting the original viral line, it’d be something like this. Hire thoroughly so you can trust the people you hired. Measure outcomes because that’s what you’re paying for. Track time and process inputs because that’s how you find out whether your business is healthy. When someone isn’t performing, do the work to figure out why before you decide what to do about it.

Less catchy. More true. Less likely to go viral. More honest though. And, frankly, I think more valuable to any who read it.

The viral version sells confidence and leads to extreme responses. The honest version probably doesn’t get as many comments, or new followers. But I’m happy with just sharing better value.

One more thing

If you got to the end of this and thought, “I’d love to actually run my business on outcomes without burning my team out or losing track of what’s happening”…..I wrote a book about exactly that.

Take Breaks, Work Better lays out the 3.3 Rule, the metrics that go with it, and the hiring and management pieces that make the whole thing work in practice. It’s the operating model my team has used to scale to nearly three hundred people, average forty-two hours a week during tax season, and grow almost five hundred percent without anyone burning out.

Preorder it at TakeBreaksWorkBetter.com before September 15. The preorder bonuses come off the table after that.

Never forget. Take breaks to go faster. To work better.

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Not by my wife. Not by my kids. Not by the 290 people who work at my accounting firm, who watched us grow the business 492 percent after I made everyone start working fewer hours during tax season. The lazy accusations come from somewhere else entirely. They come from a specific corner of the internet where doucheprenuer influencers post their 4am morning routines and their bulletproof coffee theatrics and their “I haven’t taken a day off in six years” brag posts.

If you’ve never been on the receiving end of one of these guys, congratulations. They are something else. They claim to wake up at an hour designed to make you feel guilty. They apparently cold plunge everyday. They journal in a leather notebook, which of course can be purchased for a reasonable fee of $500. They love reminding everyone that if you’re not grinding, you’re losing.

When I tell people I run my business on a framework called the 3.3 Rule, which is working up to three hours, followed by an intentional recovery break, the responses I get fall into roughly three buckets.

Bucket one calls me lazy. Bucket two accuses me of coddling employees who need to learn how to grow up. Bucket three dismisses the whole thing as fluffy work-life balance nonsense that wouldn’t survive a real industry like accounting during tax season.

I’ve heard all three for years now. What I know through data, science, and experience doesn’t require others to believe me. I do have feelings though, and I’m trying hard not to let the criticism bother me. But I sure love it when there is even more data out there. So let’s talk about someone else that if they call me lazy, they would call him lazy too.

His name was Albert Einstein.

You may have heard of him. He’s the guy who rewrote physics, won the Nobel Prize, and gave us E equals MC squared. He is also the patron saint of everything hustle culture pretends to be against.

The man slept ten hours a night.

He also napped during the day. Sometimes more than once. He walked a mile and a half to work in the mornings because he liked to walk. He took an hour and a half for lunch and tea. He wrapped up before dinner. He enjoyed his evenings.

And he produced the foundational discoveries that explain why solar panels generate electricity, why nuclear power is possible, and why GPS satellites need to correct for the curvature of spacetime to know where you are on Earth. None of which I personally understand, but it sounds like game changing stuff to me.

Try posting that schedule on LinkedIn next week and see what happens. Watch how fast someone shows up in the comments to tell you Einstein was a one-in-a-billion genius and the rules don’t apply to him and you, my friend, are not Einstein and you need to get back to the grind.

That comment will be wrong on every level, and I want to walk through why.

The nap thing is where it gets really interesting. Einstein wasn’t crashing on the couch for two hours. He was running an actual protocol. He’d sit in his chair after lunch holding a spoon. On the floor below his hand was a metal plate. He’d close his eyes and let himself drift off. The moment he hit deep sleep, his fingers would relax, the spoon would fall, and the clang would wake him up.

That was his alarm clock. A guy who shaped modern physics figured out his own micro-nap protocol with kitchen utensils. He was catching just a few minutes. Not hours. Just enough to feel his brain come back online before the next stretch of focused work.

The doucheprenuer influencers love to say they’re “wired differently.” Einstein was actually wired differently, and he chose to nap with a spoon in his hand.

Here is what the people calling me lazy do not seem to understand about how the human brain actually works.

Your brain runs on physical energy. The kind of focus required to solve a hard problem, write a real piece of strategy, have a difficult conversation, or do any task that actually moves a business forward, burns through that energy fast. Faster than most people realize.

The research lands in roughly the same place no matter who is doing it. Anders Ericsson found that elite performers cap out around four hours of true deep work in a day. Cal Newport’s research lands in the two-to-four hour range. RescueTime analyzed 185 million working hours of data and concluded the average human gets less than three hours of actual productive time per day.

So when an influencer tells you he’s deep in flow for fourteen hours, he’s lying. He may be at his desk for fourteen hours. He may be performing the appearance of work for fourteen hours. He may genuinely believe he’s working for fourteen hours. But what’s actually happening in his brain is roughly three hours of real output and eleven hours of low-grade, low-quality, mistake-generating noise.

Those mistakes do not disappear. They show up later in the week, the month, the quarter, when someone has to clean them up. The fixing creates more fatigue, which creates more mistakes, which creates more fixing. This is what most business owners are calling productivity right now.

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Einstein refused to play that game. He worked in focused blocks. He recovered between them. He gave his brain the chance to reload before the next block of real cognitive work.

That is what the 3.3 Rule actually is, and I did not invent it by reading philosophy on a beach or listening to douche bro influencers. I built it inside Incite Tax. I tested it on myself. I tested it on every team member who works for me. I watched the data over multiple tax seasons.

Preorder the book and get early access.

The result is a firm that grew 492 percent while the industry standard for tax season was 55 hours a week and we averaged 42. Better work. Fewer mistakes. People who actually stick around. An owner who eats dinner with his kids and watches a movie with his family every Sunday.

If you have spent any time in the accounting world, or honestly any professional services world, you know how rare that is. The standard playbook is to burn people out, replace them, repeat. The standard playbook is also why the accounting profession is bleeding talent faster than schools can produce new graduates. The grind isn’t working. It hasn’t been working. And every year that the industry refuses to face that reality, the problem compounds.

I have been saying this for a long time, and I am going to keep saying it. The hustle culture goons are wrong. The doucheprenuer influencers are selling a brand of misery that is killing your team and your marriage and your body and your business at the same time. The people who built the things we actually study a hundred years later did not grind themselves into dust to do it.

They protected the conditions their brains needed to work.

You can do the same thing. Not to be a damper on anything though, you will likely not be Einstein. I for sure will not be Einstein. Most of the people reading this are not going to redefine physics. But the framework that let him do what he did is not exotic. It is in fact the natural rhythm your brain has been begging you to return to for years, and the only reason you haven’t is because somebody on Instagram with a ring light convinced you that taking a real lunch was a character flaw.

Picture Einstein, sitting in his armchair at Princeton, with a spoon in his hand and a metal plate on the floor, catching a few minutes of sleep so he could go back to work and finish reshaping our understanding of the universe.

Then ask yourself: Einstein or influencer, which of the two do want to take advice from.

The full system, the science behind why this works, and the playbook I used to build a firm that thrives on fewer hours than its competition, is all in my book, Take Breaks, Work Better. Preorder it. Or become a paid subscriber here on Substack and I’ll send you a free copy.

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Working smarter has never been the lazy option. It has always been the option the smartest humans alive picked when nobody was forcing them to choose differently.

Remember, take breaks, and you’ll work better.

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I did that for years. Proudly. And I can tell you exactly what it bought me. I had a foggy brain most of the time. I had a short fuse with the people I loved most. I had a wife who was figuring out how to be the single parent to our children. And, I had kids who never saw me.

More hours was never the answer. But I kept trying that expecting a different result. And yes…that’s the definition of being an idiot. Turns out, which I finally learned, it’s the structure of the hours, not the quantity of the hours.

So today I’m going to walk through how I actually structure my workday now. I’m not giving you the influencer version with a 4am cold plunge and a green smoothie. I’m giving you the version that works inside a real business with real deadlines and real people depending on you. Let’s leave the influencers to their vanity metrics on social media. We’ll get back to creating real value.

Quick note before I get into it. If this is the kind of content that lands for you, the easiest thing you can do is hit subscribe. It’s free.

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Here’s the principle everything I’m about to say sits on top of. Your brain is not built to sustain deep focus for eight or nine or ten hours straight. Nobody’s brain is. The research on this is not subtle. You have to work in concentrated focus blocks and then recover. Then do it again. It’s that simple. You can start doing it tomorrow!

I took that research and built what I call the 3.3 Rule. You work up to three hours in a focused block. Then you take a recovery break that’s roughly thirty percent of that time. So three hours of focus earns you about a sixty-minute reset before the next block. My book has way more detail about this.

I already know what some of you are thinking, because I definitely thought this. “John, I cannot take an hour break. I have a business to run.”

Stay with me. (I also did a YouTube video on all this here.)

You likely feel like stopping work means you are wasting time. And I agree you don’t have time to waste. But, a break is something different than wasting time.

NASCAR pit crews do not apologize for pulling the car off the track. The car wins because of the pit stop, not in spite of it. Your brain works the same way. You get more done in three focused hours than in seven half-foggy ones. I’ve lived this. My team has lived this. Incite Tax grew 492% after we built around this framework, and we average 42 hours per week during tax season. The industry average is closer to 70.

The pit stops are the strategy because the car needs more fuel. It needs new tires. Your brain needs pit stops as well.

Now to the actual day. The first thing you have to understand is that not all work is the same, and most people treat it like it is. They wonder why they feel exhausted by noon and haven’t actually moved anything important forward.

Deep-focus work is the stuff that needs your full cognitive bandwidth. Things like writing. Strategy. Financial analysis. A real client conversation. A decision that has weight to it. Anything where you’re holding multiple variables in your head at the same time.

Light-lift work is the stuff that still has to get done but pulls on a different part of your brain. Things like routine email. Quick approvals. Status updates. Calls that are more update than decision. Reviews that don’t require new thinking.

Here’s what most people miss, and what I missed for a long time. Both kinds of work cost you something. Light-lift work feels free, but it never actually is. It still spends mental energy. It still requires recovery on the back end. Neither one is free. And both of them need a real break afterward. That’s the whole point.

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So here’s what mine actually looks like in practice.

The 3.3 Rule is a flexible framework, not a rigid schedule. No two days are the same, and that’s the design. Because in life, no two days are the same for you either. And you need a structure that works with that reality.

What I do in any given block depends on a lot of moving pieces. What’s the highest-leverage task in front of me right now? How did I sleep last night? Did I have a hard conversation with someone I love this morning? Is something running in the background of my brain that’s eating bandwidth before I’ve even sat down? All of that is cognitive load. And all of it changes what kind of work I can do well in any given block.

Some mornings I wake up sharp and the right call is to go straight at the hardest cognitive thing on my plate. Other mornings, life happened before I got to my desk, and the smarter call is to ease in with something lighter while my brain catches up. The 3.3 Rule meets me where I am that day…..not where I was supposed to be according to some perfect schedule I wrote on Sunday night while feeling optimistic about the week.

What stays constant is the structure itself. You work in a focused block of up to three hours. You take a real recovery break, roughly thirty percent of that time. Then you go again. That’s the whole framework. What fills the blocks shifts based on the day.

The break is non-negotiable, and that’s the part most people argue with me about. You finished three hours of deep strategic work? Take the break. You finished an hour of lighter operational work? Take the break. Your brain just spent that time pushing in one direction. It needs to decompress before it can push hard in the next direction. Skipping the break because “it wasn’t that hard” or because you can’t possibly afford to lose the time is exactly how you wall yourself into a 3pm crash and wonder why everything after lunch feels harder than it should.

And then there’s the close of the day. At the end of every workday, there’s an intentional wind-down. I want to take the time to write down tomorrow’s priorities. I leave knowing what I’m walking into the next morning, which means my brain actually gets to stop working when I close the laptop or leave the office. Which means my family gets the version of me that is present and able to still interact with them.

That’s the structure. You don’t need a ridiculous morning routine that some influencer says is the only path to greatness. You need flexible blocks. You need real recovery. The 3.3 Rule accepts that you are not the same person every morning, and it demands that you stop pretending rest is optional.

Here’s the part I want you to actually feel before you close this tab.

I run a 290-person accounting firm. Tax season at any accounting firm is the kind of thing that would justify losing your mind, if you let it. We used to let it. I was working absurd hours. My team was burning out on a predictable schedule every spring. We were making the kind of decisions that come from exhausted people running on adrenaline. Bad ones. I’ll leave it at that.

Then we changed the structure. We stopped treating every hour as identical. We protected the focus blocks. We built in real recovery. The hours dropped. The output went up. Revenue grew 492%. Tax season averages 42 hours a week for our team now.

And the part I had to experience to believe…..the business didn’t fall apart. Not only did it not fall apart, it actually got better. Clients got served faster. My team stayed. My evenings came back. My kids got their dad in the room instead of staring at a laptop at the dinner table.

That’s what’s on the other side of this.

If you want the full system, I wrote a book about it. The book is called Take Breaks, Work Better. It covers the science, the structure, and exactly how to roll this out inside a real business with a real team. You can preorder it right now at TakeBreaksWorkBetter.com/preorder.

And if this article was useful to you, I have two quick asks.

Subscribe. The only thing I promise is that it’ll be honest about what running a business actually costs and what to do about it.

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Take breaks. Work better. Freedom better.