Adam Rosenblum

so adam thank you so much for joining us on the show all right thank you so much charlie for having me really appreciate it so you're an attorney you have a non-profit organization you are involved in hatsala which is a volunteer ambulance corps and probably many other things that you're involved in is that somewhat correct that is correct teaching birthright trips j inspire you know boards of various organizations you don't stop there's never i would bet you that there's never a minute where you're like i am totally bored do you ever have that feeling no actually that happens a lot oh yeah that's that's going to be the shocker of the interview charlie so so let's talk about that because when when i looked at your uh resume when i looked at the bio that i just read um i was exhausted reading your bio and i know there's still only 24 hours in a day seven days a week and one day you get off so just like overarching how do you approach time management so i think that for many people especially people that have full-time jobs their job really becomes something that's almost all-consuming at least during work hours but unfortunately today very often after work hours as well um one of the the very you know sort of dark sides of the pandemic that you hear people talking about a lot is the fact that there's no more line between work and home and personal life you know it's just you're at home all the time and home is work and work is home and there isn't even an office to go to to make that delineation but the truth is that it started way before then because you know with advent of smartphones people are reachable all the time and i think that that blurs the lions uh a lot and so i think that you know the first thing that i have to say about time management but without talking about business structure and how i structured my business and i'd love to talk a little bit about that you know if it interests you because i do mentor a lot of business owners not just attorneys on this particular subject but just specifically in reference to you know personal time versus work time you know i have no problem telling a client you know i'm here in the office till six o'clock that's business hours please contact me tomorrow or i will get back to you at 9 or 9 30 tomorrow um and i have people from the community that are texting me all the time hey i got a traffic ticket and my kid got in trouble uh hey can you help out with this that of the third and i say you know now i'm off this is off office hours i'd love to be able to help you but we're going to do that tomorrow and i think that a lot of times people have a hard time doing that so so what i'm hearing from you is that if you if you learn how to re-put the boundaries down right that we once had you'd be able to um in many ways accomplish different diverse things because you're not going to let everything bleed into everything else you'll actually pull put the boundaries on different aspects of your life exactly and i think managing expectations is a big part of that whether it's a co-worker a boss which may be harder especially you know in my position as the business owner maybe a little easier for me to do that than the average person but you know you set that expectation at the beginning i'm very reachable during the day of course if there's an emergency you can text me or whatever the case may be or you can call the office and the answering service will pick up the call and that will be forwarded to myself but um you know outside of that i think for a lot of times people for some people like everything is an emergency you know i've got to reach you about this thing but i think probably 99 of the time it really isn't um but yeah we do have an emergency line people call in they can hit a certain number on the voice prompt and then you know they get to a live operator and and you know they can leave their message there and that gets flagged so talk to us a little bit about this business structuring thing that you referenced how do you advise is it business owners and entrepreneurs or whoever it is in terms of how to structure their business in order to help i guess get more done yeah so i am a tremendous proponent of the e-myth by michael gerber you've probably heard of it um for me that caused a tremendous shift in thinking and structuring my business and essentially the hallmarks of his particular philosophy are delegation and systemization and unfortunately one of the most challenging things for some people is delegating things to other people uh you know just even set up this interview right it wasn't charlie harari that emailed me it was charlie's assistant that emailed me and that's much more efficient because then charlie could do other things that charlie wants to do right so it's the same type of thing if i'm able to delegate and have other people that help me out with certain other things then that can free me up to do some of the passion projects right that we've talked about at the beginning of the interview and then systemization you know every business really can be systematized it really is the mantra and if a person gets to the point where things run as systems then things just become a lot more efficient and it's not just like oh what am i doing you know how do i do this oh i have to remember i have to reinvent the wheel every single time and uh you know that's something that can really help and it doesn't matter whether you're the business owner or not you can make let's say you're an employee you can make a system for your job and you can you know create certain systems for how things are supposed to run and be and make them more efficient right it's interesting you say that and i think it's a very wise piece of advice that i want to sort of rest on for a minute um when when you when you think of your life as a system in many ways right even if not all of life even if it's 10 or 20 percent are things that you do consistently or problems that keep on coming up or ways that you'd like to do something what i'm hearing you say which i think applies to people in their businesses and in their lives which is if you develop systems and you engage other people you're going to find that you can take parts of the things that you're doing every day give it to somebody else to do and it it'll still work and that'll free you up but you have to look at the world from a perspective of wait if i'm doing it consistently why don't i think about turning it into a system and having somebody else help me with it right 100 and i think judaism and the torah really tells us a lot about that i mean we have a structure to the day we have the prayers we're supposed to do at certain times you know shabbat comes on saturday every week it's not like oh next week let's make shabbat on a tuesday instead of on a thursday no like it's like clockwork the holidays go according to a certain schedule and even though there definitely is room to color within those lines you know and maybe two or two families may do certain things on shabbat very differently but there are other things that are just part of the system and you just can't decide on your own oh i'm just going to decide to make shabbat on a tuesday this week because i feel like or you know passover falls out you know right at the same time as the football season or whatever thing and so i'm just going to do passover the week before we're going to get it done and next week i'll be free to you know attend the sports game or whatever it doesn't work like that so let me just let me let me keep on going down this this path because this is fascinating and i think it's so critical you'll hear it and when you think time management people don't necessarily take it this far they think it's i got what i got let me figure out how to you know move the wheel move the pieces around like a tetris game and what you're saying is wait you can you can go above the board over here um but but here's one thing that i want to ask you about which is going to be people's blocks that's it's everyone's block which is when i give it to you to do you're not going to do it as well as me like i know how to do this and i've been doing this for so long and that's why i can't do that because i'm doing this and if i give it to you to do you're not going to do it as well as me because you don't know as much as me maybe you're a a new intern maybe you're younger than me maybe you're a different family member than i am right you're not better or worse but i know how to do this thing so how do you coach people to be okay with a product that's not going to be as good as the person to have them recognize that but the time that they get is is more valuable yeah so i get that all the time and as certainly as the senior person the firm being the founder of the firm doing this for 15 years you know people calling me all the time this question that question whatever the case may be but yeah if i didn't delegate and i didn't have associates and assistant support staff people in different countries doing stuff for me you know clearly there are going to be deficiencies that come up but i think really a lot of that first and foremost boils down to ego i'm sorry to say maybe it's like a therapy thing you know person needs to because at the end of the day to think that you are indispensable irreplaceable you're the best you're the smartest nobody can do it as well as you i think to some degree that might be an ego problem that's number one and once a person gets over that and realize well maybe that's actually not true maybe i just hired a person that's actually smarter than me quicker than me and can do something even better than me and i want to tell you something there are people in this office that have a better conversion rate than me on the phone people call up when we do that you know we do the pitch and whatever and i think i'm a great salesman i spend a lot of time i've spent a lot of time honing that craft but there are definitely attorneys in this office that do it better than me and when i brought them in they didn't know anything and i trained them from scratch and we had meetings and trainings and all these types of things so i think a lot of that is learning to put your own ego aside and then the second piece of it is what i call you know sometimes good enough is just good enough and i think uh for some people that are perfectionists it's much more difficult for them to be able to get over that but if you're not a perfectionist which i think is probably good percentage of people then it's really just about trying to make peace with the fact that you know maybe maybe it's not going to be exactly perfect you know maybe there will be a mess up or something like that but most of the time it's not going to be catastrophic and not only that a lot of times the other people won't even know you know you may be a bit bigger critic the biggest critic of your people's work than anybody else who's going to come into contact with them all that being said you need to have quality people you can't have somebody that's representing your business uh any you know that that's just going to be reflect poorly on that so you do have to make sure that you have good people but i think it was ronald reagan that said i always thought to surround myself with the best brightest smartest people and delegate so and and and just so we can bring it not only past the business world into into one's personal life um because as i'm hearing you speak it's it's resonating which is when you when we get past ourselves and we realize that my standard may not be this standard and we hire the right people but he threw something else in there that i think was so important that we just pause on which is you you took your time and you trained somebody else meaning you you spent time helping somebody else learn something that they didn't have when they got into your world and that is such an important piece because you can have the best person in the world but if they don't know what they're doing because the person on top doesn't have the time for them isn't honing them and and and growing them then they won't deliver and i feel this is not only important for people that are involved in business it's also people involved in their personal lives you know sometimes there are people in our personal lives that are not delivering the results that we like not because they don't want to be helpful because they don't know what to do and many times we have we're too busy to train people and to teach people and so we think it's because we're too busy but we don't realize that the time you spend investing in someone else will ultimately pay back dividends in the future yeah i agree with that completely and i also want to add that i think a lot of that also is trying to give people the confidence if they don't have it already that they can be independent and they can do it i mean think about parenting right it's almost like the parent that's sitting there helicoptering over the kid oh no no you color this way or oh you do the assignment that way but we don't want that ultimately we want our kids to be able to be independent so we provide them the training we send them to school we role model we show them what it means to be a good person to be a jew but really what we want is we want them to be independent and so i think that that's really what it's like here you do good training and ongoing training and you your doors our doors are always open for questions etc but ultimately we want people who can swim once we teach them how to swim they can swim on their own um and then we just give them the we invest in them at the front end which is what you're talking about but ultimately if we've done a good enough job hiring screening hiring training and ultimately these are people that are going to be able to work independently and we're not going to have to babysit them we're not going to have to helicopter them which i think is also a big problem in the work in the workforce it's really again the ego that perfectionism i gotta you know look at every single thing this person is doing not not a single shred of paper is going to go out of this office without my review and my okay and my initials i think that that's that's crazy i mean why hire people if you're gonna micromanage them you know it makes no sense so adam thank you so much for joining us these tips were really really invaluable and i think that people start to see this way and think this way like you said and when i we we began our interview i have you know i'm i have more time than you think or i have more board time than you think and now i think people can understand why because if you build the systems right you'll be able to have higher quality time and we thank you for your insights in being part of the show thank you thank you so much thank you for having me thank you thanks so much for watching for more content like and subscribe and be sure to tune in live every thursday at 8 pm eastern at the shabacho.com or right here on youtube