Build good systems, with Ben Meer

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a slightly longer one, part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us. So today I'm delighted to welcome Ben Mierda, Before Breakfast. Ben is an expert on systems and the author of the brand new book, How to Be Good at Life. Ben, welcome to the show.

0:35Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.

0:37Speaker 3:It was great spending time together recently in Miami, and it's really an honor to be here.

0:42Speaker 1:Yeah, I was so excited to meet you and to get to learn a little bit about you. But why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

0:49Speaker 3:So systems did not always come naturally to me. In 2017, I had $ 32, 000 in credit card debt, My first startup was failing, and I was waiting tables on the weekend just to make rent. And around that time, a close friend suggested that maybe I should lower my expectations in life. And that's a conversation that still motivates me today. As a Hail Mary, I applied to business school. And for some reason, Cornell said yes. And what happened there really changed everything. I was sitting in my operations class when my professor said something that completely reframed how I saw success and failure. He said the biggest difference between high-performing companies and struggling ones often comes down to their systems.

1:34Speaker 3:And suddenly, I realized why my startup had failed. We had no real systems. And you can just think of a system as a repeatable way to get a desired result. We had no sales systems. We had no customer service systems. I was just improvising everything. But then I started wondering, what if the same thing was true for people? What if the difference between someone who is thriving and someone who feels constantly overwhelmed is their systems? The systems that they use to take care of their health, the systems that they use to manage their money, to do their best work, to stay in touch with the people that they care about most.

2:10Speaker 2:And that idea really set my mind straight. on fire. I remember being in.

2:14Speaker 3:A coffee shop, just mapping out all the areas of what I imagined to be a well-rounded life and the systems that I could build to get me there. And then I started going about building them. And each system made the next one a little bit easier to build. And a few years later, my life felt completely different. I was advising Fortune 500 companies. I'd gotten my health and finances in order. and had even got engaged. And the fact that Jade, my fiancee, is excited to marry me is all the proof that I need that this stuff works. And it was around that time, you know, systems had transformed my own life. And I started to get a little bit frustrated with some of the self-help advice out there that seemed to stop at motivation. We hear these quotes like, trust the process. But I spent years trusting the process when I didn't have a process.

3:06Speaker 3:So I've I've come to believe that most people don't need more inspiration. They need better life infrastructure. And that's why I'm so passionate about this message. I think that modern life has just become too complex to navigate without better systems.

3:22Speaker 1:And so is having good systems what makes somebody good at life?

3:26Speaker 3:Being good at life is as simple as writing down your friend's birthday. Because here's what happens. On the day you get a notification, you wish them a happy birthday. their face lights up because you remembered and you feel better for doing so. And that is the whole thing in miniature. Being good at life is systematizing things today so that tomorrow feels a little bit lighter and a little bit freer.

3:50Speaker 2:And that can take many different forms.

3:52Speaker 3:That can look like keeping a running gift list on your phone so that when something comes up in conversation, you can jot it down and you're not scrambling at the end of the year during the holidays. It can look like maybe automating a little bit of your savings on payday so that your future self has a bit more financial security. It can look like managing your calendar well enough so that you can take a long weekend road trip with your partner because your work is organized enough to handle your absence. And what systems really give you surprised me. Yes, they will make you more competent. Yes, they will make you more productive. But then something else really interesting happened. starts to show up once you stack some of these wins. And it is a quiet confidence.

4:36Speaker 3:You start to trust that whatever life throws your way, you can build a system to solve it, to address it. And I think that that's the real gift of systems. It's not just being better at life, but it's feeling good at life. And I think that's a skill, which is as simple as writing down your friend's birthday that anyone can learn.

4:55Speaker 1:And I noticed in your book, How to Be Good at Life, you use a lot of names for different things. And I think like giving something a name is an underappreciated tactic in and of itself, like a system Sunday or a Saturday or a life engine audit. Do you find this that giving things names helps with being more systematic?

5:21Speaker 2:I think that it absolutely does.

5:23Speaker 3:You mentioned Saturday, so I'm happy to chat about that a little bit because I think it just makes it so much more fun. So Saturdays is something that Jade, my fiance, and I do. And we're both in busy seasons of our lives right now. We're both writing books. We run a business together. And we would find ourselves saying that we want to spend more quality time together, but life would get busy and inevitably it would get crowded out. So one of the things that we started to do was... to have Saturday dates and it is exactly what it sounds like. It is a date on Saturday on Saturday and it's this weekly routine that we do where we will carve out between one and two hours on Saturday and take turns planning something fun. So we've done over a hundred of these Saturday dates. It could look like a pottery class. It could look like salsa dancing lessons. Some of the best Saturday dates are free, whether it's like a hike or a, you know, a festival in the park. And what we learned from Saturdays is that your intentions of we should spend more quality time together is really only as good as the systems

6:32Speaker 3:that hold them, the systems that make them happen. I think sometimes people hear systems and they think, oh, they can make life mechanical or make life robotic. But I think systems can absolutely be a vehicle towards freedom if you're pointing them at the right direction. So with something like Saturdays and these other systems that we give fun names to, I think One of the reasons that I give them these names is that whenever you're building a system, you want to try to step back and ask, will this bring more joy?

7:00Speaker 2:Will this bring more connection? Will this bring more free time?

7:04Speaker 3:And if the answer is no, then that system is probably not worth building at all because it's never really about the system.

7:11Speaker 2:It's about the life on the other side of it.

7:13Speaker 3:So these systems definitely earn their names.

7:16Speaker 2:All right.

7:16Speaker 1:Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Ben Meir. So I am back talking with Ben Mayer, who is an expert on systems. He is the author of the brand new book, How to Be Good at Life. So let's talk about what you do on Sundays to prepare for the week ahead. Friday is actually my planning day, but I hear Sunday is your planning day. Maybe you can talk about what your Sunday process looks like.

7:48Speaker 3:So I used to experience these Sunday anxiety, this Sunday anxiety, this Sunday anxiety.

7:54Speaker 2:Scaries that would come up.

7:56Speaker 3:And what I discovered is that that anxiety is often just your brain asking for a plan. So System Sunday is when I carve out 30 to 60 minutes. I do mine on Sunday to really just set myself up for the week ahead. And the core part of System Sunday is getting clear on your priorities and then actually scheduling them on your calendar.

8:20Speaker 2:And this helps for a couple different reasons. It helps you.

8:22Speaker 3:Protect the things that matter most to you, but it also lets you get ahead of some of the friction that can turn up. Maybe you book back-to-back-to-back meetings and you see, okay, when am I going to go to the bathroom here? Or you see that you've double booked yourself and you can shuffle things around so that you don't have that stress on the day of. And I've been inspired by what you've shared about the weekly planning. I think it makes such a big difference that 30 minutes of planning or whether it's an hour can really make the next 167 and a half hours of the week so much lighter and so much freer. And if folks are feeling really ambitious, they can add one more thing to System Sunday, which I encourage. This is when you can build some of the simple systems too that make your life easier for years. Maybe finally you set up a password manager so you don't have to go through that dreaded password reset process and have to be identifying fire hydrants in little squares anymore. Or you put grayscale mode on your phone, which studies show can help people reclaim up to 40 minutes a day, which is

9:33Speaker 3:10 days a year that you can reclaim and then maybe use that time for leisure, things that will actually restore you. Just imagine what your life could look like in six weeks or three months setting up some of these simple systems, I can guarantee you'll remove a lot of friction from your life and you'll prevent a lot of the preventable chaos. So definitely have folks keep an open mind to scheduling some time on their calendar. whether it's Friday or Sunday, to set themselves up for the week ahead.

10:04Speaker 2:And you'll thank yourself later.

10:06Speaker 1:So you just actually take like 30 minutes and think like, what is something in my life that is a point of friction that I could potentially do now to solve? Is that like how I would approach that extra 30 minutes on top of my planning session?

10:19Speaker 2:Yeah, so.

10:20Speaker 3:For folks that are just getting started with this, I've actually outlined a 52-week challenge. We can maybe chat about that later. If folks want to check it out, it's at BenMirror.com forward slash year of systems. It's a free bonus if people end up purchasing the book. Because some people like that sort of like prescriptive going through the steps. I've done a lot of the thinking for folks. But I think something useful is maybe just to keep like a frustration... list on your phone to just try to identify some of the annoying things that keep coming up.

10:56Speaker 3:So one frustration that I was recently experiencing is I would wake up and open my computer and then I would have all of these tabs open that were not a great thing to be waking up to. If I somehow ended up on Twitter at night or ended up on the news, that's not exactly how I wanted to be starting my day. So trying to then see that friction point and then put in a system to include a little bit of a shutdown routine, add that to my checklist before going to bed so that I wasn't waking up to these distractions and the next day could go a bit smoother.

11:32Speaker 1:So this episode is going to be airing around the start of October, which is around the start of Q4. And you talk about how 90-day projects are often a good length of time for somebody to tackle something. What are some examples of good 90-day projects that you've seen people take on? And why is this a smart timeframe for people to be thinking?

11:55Speaker 3:I love 90-day projects because it's close enough to motivate you, but it's also long enough where you can make meaningful progress on that project. And I do think that it's helpful to have something that's contained in a 90-day sprint so that you are working towards a goal, that you are working towards something on the horizon. I am a big proponent of goals. There was a fascinating study that I read about where they dropped people in both a forest and in both a desert. And they made sure that there was no sun overhead where they can orient themselves or things that are on the horizon. They told the folks to walk in a straight line to make progress.

12:38Speaker 3:And the people thought that they were, but within 45 minutes, they would end up circling back to where they were originally. And maybe that's just evolutionary, I think, during our days as hunter and gatherers.

12:51Speaker 1:We drift 2% a little bit to the side.

12:54Speaker 3:We drift back to the safety or what we perceive as being less risky. And that's why there's a big parallel here with goals. It's important to have something on the horizon that pulls us forward. One that I did recently over the past year was I ran my first half marathon. And that gave me something to work towards. I had, you know, there was a race day, and I could build a training plan that built my capacity to end up running those 13.1 miles. Because if I didn't have that, there would likely be a tendency to just do the, you know, the 20 minute walk or the one mile every day, which is great, but it wouldn't necessarily stretch my potential in the way that a goal could in the way that a 90 day project could.

13:39Speaker 1:And the thing with 90 days is you can still do multiple goals a year, but then you're focused on one at a time instead of sort of diluting your efforts, right?

13:48Speaker 2:That's absolutely right.

13:50Speaker 3:I think the more things that we add to those 90-day sprints, the less likely we are to achieve any one of them. So I like to have one main sort of focus and goal. And it's okay to have a couple of these focuses and goals in different life categories and different life areas. Maybe you have one in your health. Maybe you have one in your business. But I'd be careful not to stack too many within each of the life areas.

14:16Speaker 1:So I wanted to get back to a goal you had mentioned earlier that you had worked on, which is that several years ago, you found yourself with a significant amount of credit card debt. And then you also took on student loans on top of that. If somebody else is in a situation where they're sort of trying to claw out from debt, what advice would you give them?

14:39Speaker 3:So I want to disclose that this is not financial advice because I'm not necessarily qualified to give it, but I can just speak from my own experience here that I was in quite a bit of debt from the first business and from student loans. And My advice is you want to try to turn that intention into infrastructure. I think many of us have been in a situation where maybe we've read a self-help book about personal finances, and we genuinely are inspired. We genuinely feel more motivated that we want to save more.

15:20Speaker 2:And we can have that intention.

15:23Speaker 3:But if things get stressful, if things get busy, our spending is going to end up... expanding to whatever we have. So I think the real trick is to try to automate some of your savings. I'm a little bit skeptical to give a certain percentage here. But I think if you can automate even just a little bit of what feels comfortable to you on your payday before you see it, then you've immediately turned that intention into infrastructure. And of course, you can always build from there. But you're sort of doing this kindness for your future And I think another good policy is as you continue to make more money to try to contribute more and more through this automated savings, I think the less we can rely on our own motivation and our own discipline and willpower, the better.

16:16Speaker 1:All right. Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Ben Muir. So I am back talking with Ben Meir, who is the author of the book, How to Be Good at Life. So Ben, a lot of people listening to a podcast called Before Breakfast have their morning routines. I understand you have one as well. Can you share that with us?

16:43Speaker 2:Absolutely.

16:43Speaker 3:So I do have a morning routine and it looks very different than what it used to be. So in my mid-20s, I had this limiting belief that before I could become successful, I had to prove to myself that I deserved it. So I built this two-hour stack of rituals that I made myself complete before I could do any real work. We're talking face in a bowl of ice water, writing with my non-dominant hand. I was doing dual end back brain training, drinking lemon water at precisely 98.6 degrees. And now that I'm saying it out loud, it just sounds completely insane. And I kept this up for months. The wake-up call was looking at my habit tracker and seeing this beautiful unbroken streak and then looking at my actual life and realizing that nothing had really changed.

17:32Speaker 3:I hadn't built anything. I wasn't particularly happier. I just got an extremely good at checking all those boxes. And Chris Williamson has a term for this that I love. It's the productivity rain dance. We'll perform all of these rituals, hoping they'll summon this perfect state to do great work and What I learned is that you don't need to get into flow before you start. Starting is often what will put you in flow. So now my morning routine is really just a few essentials. I drink a big glass of water. I like to think of this as an internal shower. I make myself an espresso, which is just one of my simple pleasures. And then I do a 10-minute guided meditation from Sam Harris' Waking Up app.

18:17Speaker 3:So the whole thing takes 20 minutes instead of 2 hours. And then I'll just start on my most important work for the day, which is usually writing or something strategic. And then after that, four mornings a week, I'll go to Barry's boot camp, which is just 50 minutes of high intensity interval training. All to say is you don't need some extravagant morning routine to prove that you are worthy of success. There's usually a straighter path. You'll do a few high ROI things to take care of yourself and then maybe some things to take care of people in your family too. And then you can get to the work that moves your life forward or the things that genuinely make you happy.

18:57Speaker 1:I love it. I love that productivity rain dance. I think I'm going to have to quote that one. We see a lot of that in people's routines and rituals. So then what happens after that? How do you like to structure your work days in order to get a lot done?

19:13Speaker 3:So I try to define what a productive day looks like before the day starts. I personally use something called the 3-3-3 method, which comes from Oliver Berkman. So that's three hours on my most important project, three shorter tasks, and then three maintenance activities. I love this because it solves a problem that I think a lot of ambitious people have, which is no matter how much you get done, it never feels like enough. And there's actually a term for this called productivity dysmorphia. And just like body dysmorphia distorts what you see in the mirror, Productivity dysmorphia. distorts how you see your own output. You could cure cancer before lunch and your brain would be like, yeah, but did you answer that Slack message from Greg? And part of this is structural. I think in the industrial era, done was very obvious. Your shift ended, the mail route was finished. But in knowledge work, There's no natural finish line.

20:12Speaker 3:The goalposts just keep moving because we never planted them in the first place. So the 3-3-3 method will give you that finish line. So for me, the first three hours, I'll do all my most important work, as I was mentioning earlier. That's my offense. That's the creative work during my peak energy. And then I'll do three shorter tasks, things that matter but don't necessarily require my best energy. I try to move all my meetings into the afternoon.

20:38Speaker 3:So my small company... We have this policy that we don't do meetings in the morning so that people can do their more creative and strategic work in the morning instead. For these shorter tasks, maybe it's feedback on something, reviewing a proposal. And I'll try to batch those together. And then three, maintenance activities. And I'll be honest, life asks a lot of us. So it does end up being a few more than three maintenance activities. But this is things like email, exercise, meal prep.

21:07Speaker 2:And that's it. When I hit my 3-3-3, I'd.

21:11Speaker 3:Do my best to close my laptop guilt-free because I've done enough for today.

21:16Speaker 2:And obviously, you can tune the numbers to your own life. I think an.

21:20Speaker 3:Executive that's in a busy season, he might need five hours of deep work. A parent with a newborn might only need one or be able to get one. I think the exact numbers matter less than the principle of trying to define enough before the day begins. And if you can, to let yourself feel satisfied when you hit it.

21:41Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, the idea of if email as a task is its own chunk of maintenance, then that feels much more doable. Because I was listening to you and I'm like, does that mean I only get to answer three emails? Like, I mean, how does I assume there's some the gray area here?

21:55Speaker 2:People would be waiting a long time.

21:57Speaker 1:They've been waiting a long, long time for responses if I only got to three a day. But thank goodness that can count as one maintenance activity. But the idea being like, we need to set some limit on it. And then when we achieve the limit, we can feel good about ourselves that we have We have done it. So, Ben, I always ask my guests, what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?

22:22Speaker 2:One thing. Well, let's just say aside from having a conversation with Laura Vanderkam, aside from that, one thing that I've done recently is build a mood shift playlist.

22:34Speaker 3:It's just a small collection of songs that I already know can lift my mood. So when I'm feeling a little bit off or even having a good day and just want to make it a bit better, I can just press play. And if people are curious, a particularly useful place to start for your mood shift playlist is the music that you loved as a teenager. Studies show our emotional connection to music from those years is unusually strong, peaking around age 17. Researchers call this the reminiscence bump.

23:05Speaker 3:But your playlist doesn't have to be all teenage anthems. Mine has everything from Lovely Day by Bill Withers to Wagon Wheel to Fly by Sugar Ray and Soak Up the Sun by Sheryl Crow, which I will defend to the death.

23:23Speaker 1:It is a good song. I will go with you on this one. So I've gone to several concerts this summer by... artists who were really big in like 1995 to 1997, which, you know, corresponds roughly with, you know, what you're talking about, the teenage years here. And it is so fun. It is so fun. Like, I mean, just listening to the, you know, I only had like 10 CDs and I played them over and over again. And so the songs are burned into your brain. And I'm just like, you know, I'm back there. I'm 16 again.

23:53Speaker 2:It's fun. I love that.

23:55Speaker 3:Jade makes fun of me a lot because sometimes I'll listen to Pandora. Because for whatever reason, Pandora, she's like, you're such an old man. But for whatever reason, Pandora has these great summer hits of the different decades. And it's perfect for this kind of mood shift.

24:11Speaker 1:Yeah.

24:12Speaker 2:90s summer.

24:12Speaker 1:Those were great summers.

24:14Speaker 2:All right.

24:14Speaker 1:Well, Ben, where can people find you?

24:18Speaker 3:So the best place to find me is my newsletter, System Sunday, where I share one system every week for health, wealth, and free time. That's at BenMuir.com slash BenMuir.

24:28Speaker 2:System Sunday.

24:30Speaker 3:And if folks want to go deeper, they can check out my upcoming debut book, How To Be Good At Life, which is available everywhere that fine books are sold.

24:39Speaker 2:Awesome.

24:39Speaker 1:Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback on this or any other episode, you can always reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening. And here's to making the most of our time.

25:02Speaker 4:Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

25:33Speaker 1:You