We live in a time when work and play blend together and there are never enough hours in the day. Automating and optimizing your life enables you to have your cake and eat it too. My name is Ari Meisel. I am a serial entrepreneur. I started my first company when I was twelve years old and am now working on my seventh venture. I am an advisor to half a dozen companies, involved in several charities, and pursue my interest in several hobbies. I have made it my obsession to optimize and automate any task I encounter whether it’s in a business or in my personal life. This is the essence of doing less and living more.
One of the tenets of lifestyle design is batching, something I started doing back in college. I graduated a year early by taking a lot of extra classes but even with the increased course load, in my final semester, I only had classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which gave me a full day of rest and every weekend was a four day weekend. The long hours of class on those two days gave me momentum rather than tiring me out and I don’t remember it being any more difficult than a normal schedule.
Nowadays I have a virtual assistant in India, graphic designers from South America and Europe, and about a dozen other professionals who I will never meet but make my life easier on a daily basis. The hardest thing to accept in this process is that you have to delegate and trust someone else to do the work you’ve given them. Once you let go enough that you don’t think about something after the task is assigned, you have truly reached optimization nirvana.
It’s part art and part science and you can always do better. By working through these processes you will learn an immense amount about the tasks themselves and how much they can be broken down into basic parts that can be accomplished by others.
Jameson and I are not experts but I think we have both done a pretty good job of organizing our lives to live them to fullest while accomplish great things both professionally and personally. We hope to share with you some of the techniques, anecdotes, and tools from our quest for Less Doing, More Living.
