How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work with Nick Sonnenberg

<p dir="ltr">In today’s episode, our guest is Nick Sonnenberg. He is an entrepreneur, Inc. columnist, and guest lecturer at Columbia University. He is also the author of "Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work." He is the founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement his CPR® Business Efficiency Framework. </p> <p dir="ltr"><strong>[2:27] Why should I listen to you? </strong></p> <p dir="ltr">You’d listen to me because the stuff that I’m interested in is the most valuable thing that anyone could give someone, which is the gift of time. </p> <p dir="ltr"><strong>[3:55] Can you walk us through your journey? </strong></p> <p dir="ltr">I called my book "Come Up for Air" because the first thing I hear people say is that they're drowning in work, especially in recent years. I’ve been drowning in work for a long time, so everything I talk about is not from theory but from what I have experienced as a person. I know the pain of growing a company and working 100 hours a week; before then, I worked as a high-frequency trader on Wall Street, where I worked my ass off too. But one thing I've done exceptionally well is training myself. I know what drowning in work feels like, so my company does operational efficiency consulting and training for teams and other companies. We brainstorm with the team and come up with a new technology. It could be a new way to use that technology and it could have nothing to do with it but for me, time is the most precious resource and it’s so easy to fall into the trap of doing things the same way in an inefficient manner because you are used to it. </p> <p dir="ltr"><strong>[6:20] How did you balance that? </strong></p> <p dir="ltr">I've always been passionate about time. As a high-frequency trader, I build algorithms for computers to trade stocks at micro and nanosecond speeds. I gained an appreciation for the value of time because a microsecond could mean a million. I decided to leave finan