YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Corcos

lines on the record: 220
first: 2023-09-20
most recent: 2023-09-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Future endeavors exactly. And there's probably a place where it's a better fit, but this definitely would not have worked. And so, yeah, it's really about finding those points at which somebody will opt out of the process.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very much view this is one of the failure modes that I think many companies find themselves in with recruiting is that it is fundamentally a matching problem, not a sales problem. And so I share a lot of information during the interview process of all of the reasons why you probably won't want to work here. And some people are super energized by those. Like I had an interview very recently, I talked about all of our one-on-ones are recorded and shared. In fact, this conversation that we're having in this meeting, like this conversation is recorded and will be shared with our whole company. And the response was, okay, can we delete this recording? And I don't want to be part of this anymore. Like, great. We've now ended the process”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've tried, we thought about it. The best style guide that we have is really just our existing memo structure. There's somebody David Perel, who does a writing course that we've talked about, maybe putting together something for corporate writing, but he hasn't put that together yet. Hopefully he does at one point. There's definitely space for something that you can give to people in a corporate setting to help them up level their writing skills. It definitely does filter people out. We've had people opt out of our interview process because of the requirement to do writing. And one could argue that those people might not be capable of the kind of thought that we need them to.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you still have to convince me that this is the right decision. And you can say, look, here's what we think, here's a comp that does it really well. It's going to take us one week to try it. It's like plausible. Sure, great. Go for it. But if what you're saying is here's how I want to spend $20 million over the course of the next two years. It's got to be pretty convincing. And it's probably going to be more than a couple bullet points to convince me.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, to be fair, it's not copy edited. It's not, there's a lot of scratch notes in there. It's not intended for distribution. It's an internal memo. So, what people often miss is that this one person's set of decisions, if it took him a month to come up with this decision, that is going to impact probably 20 or 30 people for the next couple years. And if it takes them an extra week to make the right decision Yep, by all means, take an extra week. Take an extra month. Take however long it takes to make sure that this is the right decision because it has long lasting implications for the business. And so you kind of have to weigh these things on, you don't need to write a 200-page memo for something that's really trivial.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, it was an incredibly thoughtful memo. It required a lot of context from areas that I did not know before. And I needed to be convinced that this was a good idea. And the thing is, people like 200 that's ridiculous. It took them about a month. Like full time effort about money.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but it was a big commitment. It was like a commitment of something that would have cost about $10 million. And so I really wanted to make sure that this person knew what it is that they were doing”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was just like, okay, we clearly hired the right person. Everything in here is better than what I came up with. So I trust him to make these decisions. And so we usually ask people. One of their first tasks, especially if they're a functional leader, to put together a strategy of what is it that you're going to do? What are the strategic elements of your function and convince me that I can trust you to do this effectively? And the only way to do that is in writing, having all of your thoughts written out. And some of these memos are pretty long.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's on long form memos and decision making, which is that some of this is just a personal preference, but I think there's some universal truth to it, which is that for me to have confidence that somebody is good at their job and knows what they're doing, you don't just get that for free. You have to earn it. And it typically comes from, in my case, a long-form memo. If you join as a good example of this, Mike Haney or head of editorial, I wrote our first editorial strategy and it was okay. It had some broad strokes of we're going to focus on this kind of content and not this kind. It was an okay strategy. And then we brought on Mike Kaney, who was from Popular Science magazine. And his first task during onboarding, during his first month, was put together the next version of our editorial strategy. And it was easily 10 times better than the one that I came.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, man, that was not helpful. It's just writing is thought. And so I think where it comes down to is having a really thoughtful memo. An artifact that you can reference in the future. It gives you these data points of what were we thinking at each point in time.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And I did an experiment with this where I Tried to figure out there's an emotional hurdle to blocking off, in my case, usually a full day to just like, all right, I need to write a memo on company strategy. Today's the day. Man, it's just so much effort to do that. What if I just had a call with somebody and I just spitballed all my ideas? And I tried it. Did this with my co founder, and we just bounce back ideas for a couple hours. And then we pulled the transcript and we pulled the useful bits. And we had like two paragraphs of useful information from a couple hours of conversation.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you cannot write out your ideas, you do not have coherent thoughts. And a lot of people can convince themselves in a meeting where they're talking to people like, oh yeah, I made a really good point there. Or like we came to a good conclusion. Go back.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or I wake up 30 minutes before. And so I've created a lot of structure around me to make sure that I'm on the path. So some of it is reducing friction here, increasing friction there. If left to my own devices, I would spend all day on social media and YouTube, and I would sleep in and I would not be able to do the work that I need to get done. And so there really is not this intrinsic capability to be super disciplined. It's around creating structures around me to force me to do the things that I want to do at some higher level.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that I would categorize as a misconception, which is that I'm extremely diligent and rigorous and disciplined. My default behavior is not disciplined. I've worked with some people, like my former co-founder, Todd Opowski, who was in special forces, and he wakes up at like four in the morning every day to work out for two hours. And he's one of those guys. And he just does it intrinsically. I schedule early morning meetings, like 8 a.m. breakfasts, because if I don't, I won't wake up. I will sleep until my first meeting. And if that's at 11, then I wake up at 11.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. And there's nothing wrong with one way or the other, but just learning how to interact with different people. We found it super helpful.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, it's a real problem. And I feel it viscerally when I get pulled out of flow state. So I usually tell people that when you see a deep focus block on my calendar, unless it is a real emergency, don't text me. Send me a note. I'll get to it at some point. Other people are exactly the opposite, which is they say, text me anytime. I like to be fast responder. That's my thing.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like My phone by default is on do not disturb mode pretty much all the time. It is often in airplane mode. And so when I'm working on things, I really, really do not like getting text messages from people like anything urgent because this is something that I've just come to accept about myself is that it takes a long time for things to get loaded into memory. And these constant context switching. This is why I load all of my meetings on Monday. If I'm in manager mode as opposed to maker mode, I have no issue context switching all the time. But if I'm trying to deliver something or I'm trying to write code and I get disrupted.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure. One of the categories is just background. We do a little bit more work than is typical. We actually hire a writer to do what we call a spotlight where they interview this person and give a whole rundown of interesting things about them. And so you read a little bit more about them. You learn what their hobbies are, where they grew up, all kinds of stuff. The more tactical things are Communication patterns. For example, for me, I really, really do not like being interrupted. And so my phone is by default.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exact same format. We both took it from the same person. I don't remember. I think he referenced it in the podcast, but there's a specific person who popularized this. And it's been super helpful.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it saves you a lot of time, and you can build that confidence and you can give feedback. And oftentimes it only takes two or three cycles of that doing it in parallel before you can largely be hands off. And then they can eventually be in mission critical positions.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the same way that turning on a loom, worst case scenario, you just delete it. It's kind of the same with parallel tasking. Worst case scenario, you just don't use what they came out with. And then that's fine. Like you were in the same exact position now as you were before. But oftentimes what you'll discover, like in the example I gave for the retro, you realized, wow, this is 80% as good as the one that I came up with. And I thought I had context that only I had. And so he said, thing I learned from that experience was I should put more information in my daily updates so that I don't have to do any work next time. I just put a little bit more work into my daily updates. And then the entire retro can be done by an EA.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Postmortem exactly, it's the same thing, just a less, uh. Less morbid title So he was going to do it himself. And I said, great, you should do it yourself. But also, since we do daily async updates, so every day he posted a loom of his progress that day. I said, but also in parallel, ask the product EA to do their own retro from what they got in context from your daily updates.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retro. It's like a retroactive document that just says, here's how the project went. Here's what went well. Here's what went poorly. Here's what I propose for next steps.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People do a better job on a first draft with almost no context than you would anticipate. You just give them maybe by loom some instructions of, hey, I'm doing a presentation on this. Here are the messages to read through. It should look something like this, an outline kind of like that. And then you see what they put together. And if it doesn't work, you give them feedback. A recent example for us is One of our engineers, Marillo, needed to do a retro on a project that took him about three-ish weeks”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think an example would be you need to put together a slide deck for a presentation on Friday. And you can say, hey, you put it together and you don't want to show up in that meeting or like an hour before and realize the slides are bad. This is a thing people often do is they delegate it and then they forget about it when really you should just do it in parallel such that worst case scenario you just throw out their version and give them feedback on it. And what people usually discover is that”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so let's say you have something that needs to be delivered on Friday and you are going to do it, but instead you hand it off to your chief of staff. Don't rely on what their output is to get that delivered on Friday. If you were going to do it yourself, just do it yourself anyway.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another one that I would say for people who are blue belt level delegators is really doing more in parallel tasking, which is anything that you are going to do anyway, just have your EA or Chief of Staff do it as well. But don't put them in the mission critical path. This is one of the failure modes that a lot of people have.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It can be anything. It can be an image, something that shows progress over time. People need to feel that things are working and that things are good. If they don't, you just leave this void, the example of the person who felt like he wasn't getting leverage from his EA. He just hadn't looked at all the things that they were doing. They were all there. He could have found them, but they were all happening behind the scenes and he forgot that the automation was even happening. And so just having that visibility and saying, okay, we ended that conversation going, you actually might need another one because you're already almost at the limit of this person's capacity and we only eliminated two out of something like 40 tasks.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we looked at each of the tasks and we looked at how much time each task takes. And the thing is, they're happening behind the scenes. And so he didn't have a lot of visibility into it. And so this is one of the reasons why we actually internally, why we do the Friday Forum is celebrating wins, having artifacts to represent progress is actually really important.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having a system where you keep track of all of the ongoing tasks. And I said, okay, cool. Well, if you don't need one, that's not a big deal. Obviously, it costs us less money. But before we do that, let's go into the database and let's see all the tasks that this person is doing for you. And let's decide which of these we don't need. And he had something like 30 ongoing tasks. How about this one? He's like, no, I definitely still need that. How about this one? Probably should keep that one. We went through almost all of them. I think we eliminated two of them. It's like, okay, well. It sounds like you're getting a lot of leverage out of your EA.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It depends Yeah, if somebody is intermediate, I would say that One would be creating a system of feedback loops. Because one of the things that fails here, and this was a conversation I recently had with somebody on our team who said that he just doesn't feel like he's”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's fine because I have other things that I could be doing with my time that are higher value than these tasks. And so if I could be spending 30 hours a week on these tasks, it might take them 90 hours a week, 100 hours a week of effort to be able to do these tasks. But then I don't have to do them anymore. And then I can do other things. And so the underutilization thing has really, I certainly didn't start with four. I started with one and she's been great. And interesting thing about this is we're really leaning into remote is she's in the Philippines. We don't overlap very much in terms of time zone. I have still not communicated synchronously with her. All of our communication has been async in looms or in content or in some form of async manner so that you can reference all of your previous conversations. I don't have any specific reason not to talk to her. It's just we haven't needed to do that.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost all of the tasks that I have them do are recurring ankle biter tasks that would take me five minutes here and there. And the reality is they just accumulate. So part of it is that almost certainly I will be able to do it faster and more effectively. But this is a comparative advantage thing is if it takes me 10 minutes and it takes them 30 minutes”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Like it is the empirical record of your actual priorities. And almost everybody that I talk to, those two are not matching.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Murder someone with an axe? Are you actually an axe murderer? The act is what makes you what you are. I think this has Ben Horotz's book, what you do is who you are. That is what it is and how you spend your time. It doesn't matter.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's more that having the awareness. I was talking to somebody recently about this where we did a values exercise and they came up with a set of values that they have. And then it's a bit of a trick question because then you say, all right, let's go over your calendar and how you spent your time. And they'll say, oh, my values are friends, family, this, that. It's like, oh, how'd you spend your time? It's like YouTube, Instagram. Do you notice how none of these things match? Like your actual priorities are consuming news. Your actual priority is doing sports, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But empirically, your priorities are this. How you spend your time are your priorities. And that's a difficult thing for people to understand, but it really is like an epistemological problem where the example would be, if you're an axe murderer, but you go your whole life and you never”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is 80% Snickers bars? Exactly. It's surprising, even for I really try to be diligent about it. And even so, I think this ultimately comes from there's an emotional cost to doing certain things that you don't like to do.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't know where that negativity comes from, but I certainly hear that a lot. So one of the things that they do is I have a set of categories that are things that I think that I want to do with my time. And so every 15 minute increment, I think weekly they go through and they update a spreadsheet of each block and then they categorize it in one of these 10 categories. And then at the end of the month, I can see how I spent my time. And it is humbling to see how often”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't have expected. They're like, do you really need to optimize every 15 minutes of every day? Don't you have time for spontaneity? These are the common things that I hear. The answer is like, yeah, of course I have lots of time for spontaneity. I schedule it. It's like. This is a week, I'm not planning anything. Anything could happen, but I'm doing it on purpose, not by accident.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if there's anything from these sorts of people, just send me a note and say, hey, I think you should respond like this. This is the semi-automation part. Same with Twitter DMs. I don't manage those. I get a screenshot whenever somebody that they think meets the criteria that they think I should be talking to. And that's all managed by them. And so those are just a handful of examples of like the ways in which I can get leverage on my time, things that... Used to maybe do myself, but at this point, I have so many of these tasks. Like another one that I have my EAs do consistently is I'm really diligent about tracking my time. It's one of those interesting things where this is similar to calendly. I get people who just aggressively negatively respond to the idea that you pay attention to where your time is going. Really? Oh, yeah”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My EAs are creating all of this behind the scenes. I used to do it myself, but over time, I just trained the EAs to do it so I don't have to do it. And it really just gives me a ton of leverage. So things like almost nobody I know pays attention to their LinkedIn messages anymore. It's just a cesspool. But if you have an EA that you've trained to like, hey, filter out any random requests from Dev Shops in India. Just archive those immediately.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So some simple things are before every call, I send two days before the call, I send links that provide more context for who I am, what the company does, whatever the thing is. And so two days before, they get that information. They also do follow-ups. So I have a notion page called Sam's Calls, where before I jump on this call, I have all of my call notes stacked and I have context on each one of them. So I open up my calendar, I go to the call, and then I open my notes. And your call with this person. Here's a screenshot of the email that you had with them setting up this meeting.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I filtered for the ones that contain confidential information, but there's, I don't know, 40, 50 of them that are kind of examples.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reducing that stress that is created by having this ambiguously long list of potential tasks that you need to do, there's no way to see in an email that I need this from you by 2 o'clock today or I need it from you next month. You have to go through every single one individually in order to get that information.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You didn't need to spend 15 minutes on that. You could have just said yes, and if you need more, let me know, and I can give you more. So don't make the assumption that you have to spend 15 minutes on it if you usually don't have to. And so just having that feedback loop is really helpful and this keeps tying back to Loom as a useful tool for this. But being able to just see it. In the previous era, you would have just had a coach standing over your shoulder watching, and now you can do this asynchronously. I can watch it at two and a half X. I can skip over parts that are not relevant. So it's a really big enablement tool.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mark has done. I think one of the biggest ones is snippets where you have predrafted messages. And this is something that it's really easy to see when a good example, my co-founder, Casey, when she was struggling with email, I asked her to just record yourself doing email for however long it takes. And then I'll watch it and give you feedback. And this is the workflow thing where she just recorded it, she shared it with me, and there were many points where I would say, hey, during this point, have you noticed this is the fourth time you sent this exact same email and you type it out every time, you should just create a snippet and you should just send it to them. You see this part here where you wrote a very long response. He was actually really just asking for a yes or no. You didn't have to provide much longer context. You could have said, yeah, that sounds good. If you need any more context, let me know. And that could have been it.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same idea. The thing is, most people just don't take the time to learn it. There's several studies on this that I can share with you, but it's like free productivity. You spend a handful of minutes, 15 minutes, maybe 10 minutes one time learning what hotkeys to use. And most people will see a 10 to 40% increase in productivity immediately for the rest of their lives. And yet most people don't take the time to learn them. It is if you are not using hotkeys to process your email, to do, if you're in Figma, learn the hotkeys. If you're in Photoshop, learn the hotkeys. It's a free productivity boost for almost no cost.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason and then I just share that to them as feedback, and then the process just gets better. It's probably the biggest hole of people imposing upon my attention. It's something that I'm trying to work on a solution to. I know there have been interesting companies that have tried different things like you have to pay money to send somebody an email. I don't know if those ever took off, but that's an interesting strategy. It's like just adding some friction. It's like, yeah, if you pay me $100, you can send me an email. That's okay. And I will read it. I will definitely read it if you pay me $100 to get an email. Sure. So the nature of processing email, I think the way to do it most efficiently, I use Superhuman as a tool. Hotkeys are probably the lowest hanging fruit for people to improve their productivity for almost no cost.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An inbox zero person. I tried to hit inbox zero at least once a week, which is the practice of marking all emails that you've processed as done. So you get to the end of the week and you have processed all of your emails. It is definitely one of the holes in this strategy where I get lots of uninvited inbound information. I do have a process by which my EAs clear my inbox. I have a separate category called not important where they go through and they just move all the things they don't think I need to see into that. And I check it every once in a while. And in the early days, every so often they would flag something as not important that I actually should have seen. But at this point, it's like a 100% success ratio of them seeing my patterns. And typically what I do is I turn on a loom as I'm going through the not importance. And I say, yep, these all make sense. Oh, this one should probably keep in because of this reason. This one we should pull in because of this.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Calend is an incredible time saving tool where you set times that you're available. It syncs with Google Calendar. And so when I have time blocked off to do things, it doesn't show up as an availability. And you set what hours are available. And so people can just pick time on your calendar. This is why I think when I get a calendar link from somebody, I'm touched because they are allowing me to impose upon their attention. They're saying, I'm giving you access to my time. Whenever is convenient for you. That's a tall order.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT