Viking Accountability: Prioritizing Work and Finding Time for Rest with Ben Catley-Richardson
Key Takeaways
- Ben's number one tip: see rest and reflection as part of the growth cycle. Time off still drives the business forward, and the 60-hour week isn't sustainable.
- Six hours of sleep is slowly killing you, per Matt Walker's Why We Sleep, and it loses the growth you made that day. Skills bank during sleep the same way muscle does.
- The word priorities is only about 150 years old and contradicts itself. One priority makes every decision easier and removes the procrastination that comes from avoiding decisions.
- Make your tasks fight to the death. If you can't find the priority, you have a clarity problem: name the blocker to your goal, and the priority is whatever removes it.
- Growth passes through five gates: awareness, agitation, attention, reward, process. Most people skip the last two and exhaust themselves going in circles.
- Add up the time you spend deciding what to do next, getting distracted, and procrastinating, and it's probably a day. You're already working a four-day week; you just don't feel it.
Ben Catley-Richardson is the Accountability Viking: a coach for agency founders three to five years in who want the business to grow beyond their own head, and the founder of Get Shit Done and Have More Fun. The Viking persona, he says, gives him permission to stand out and makes him live up to it. Kuba Grajcar hosted and asked him about rest, picking one priority, and the five gates his program is built on.
Rest and reflection are part of the growth cycle
Kuba opened with the show’s traditional question: your number one tip for agency operators. Ben said the founders he works with believe the 60-hour week is the solution, and he’s been there himself as a video games journalist on press week. It isn’t sustainable.
The number one tip would be that if people can start to see that the not working, the off game, the switching off and having downtime, is just as valuable, in fact sometimes even more valuable, as the 60 hour weeks and the long time spent at the desk… Taking time off isn’t doing nothing. It’s actually still driving you forwards and making it possible to create a sustainable business.
Digital agency owners, he said, are the most overstimulated group he’s worked with: phone first thing in the morning, LinkedIn all day, clients on the other side of the planet at night. The science he leans on starts with sleep.
There’s a book by a guy called Dr. Matt Walker called Why We Sleep, and it is terrifying. Utterly terrifying. Because basically it’s telling you six hours sleep at night is killing you… The inescapable truth of it is that we need more than six hours sleep or we are slowly killing ourselves, and we’re basically losing the growth that we’ve made, because that rest turns out to be an irreplaceable part of it.
You can’t have priorities, plural
Kuba asked how an owner who gets pinged on Slack all day even starts. Ben’s first move is a single priority, for a week or for months, and he’d like agencies to stop using the plural.
Stop thinking that you can have priorities. The word priorities is actually a recent invention. The word priorities didn’t exist until about 100, 150 years ago, which coincidentally is the Industrial Revolution, when we were all told where we had to be and how long we had to work. But if you look at the word, it means the one thing that comes before all other things. You can’t have multiple priorities because it just doesn’t make sense.
Owners push back that client delivery, business development, and life all matter. Ben says that’s exactly why they work so long: constantly deciding what to do next drains energy, and procrastination is the brain’s defense against a decision it doesn’t want to make.
Make your tasks fight to the death, then find the blocker
How do you pick the one? Ben’s answer came with Viking imagery and, as he kept warning, more bad news.
You’ve got to make everything fight to the death. You have to get your tasks to fight for survival, and the only way you can do that is by testing a single priority… There’s no tried and tested, easy, convenient route to a single priority. The only way you’re going to find that is by experimenting, testing. Does this work? Does this not?
His own example was improving onboarding: run every task against it and see what fits. If nothing does, the problem is upstream.
If you’re struggling to find that priority, it means that you’re actually struggling with clarity, with direction… You have to understand what is the thing that means I don’t have that goal right now. Why don’t I have it right now? What’s the blocker? And usually, maybe with some help or talking through with somebody, you can find the blocker to your goal, and then the priority is the thing that is going to assist you in removing that blocker.
The five gates: awareness, agitation, attention, reward, process
Ben’s program is built on research from a neuroscientist friend in the States who runs a neuroscience institute. The analogy is the gym: muscle is built after the workout, mostly during sleep, and learning banks the same way. Longer hours won’t get you as far as doing the work and then sleeping.
The gates run in order. Awareness: a goal like “more clients” is too generic to tell you what to do, so name the blocker. Agitation: the trigger that gets you moving, which for most people is a deadline or a stick (“if you keep using sticks, you just get bruises”), so Ben uses James Clear’s environment design instead. Attention: focus, which is where competing priorities fall apart; Ben compares it to trying to breathe in and out at the same time. Reward: measure process goals you control, like people talked to and events run, since you can’t make a client sign. Process: rest, so you come back with your energy recovered.
If you go through all of the gates, you find yourself in this rhythm and you find yourself making progress. If you try and miss out, and usually people miss out the last two gates, you get stuck and you’re not getting anywhere, and all you’re doing is exhausting yourself.
You’re already working a four-day week
Kuba asked what Ben actually does with clients. Ben said he skips the science and goes to the benefit: you don’t have to work 60 hours a week to grow, and you can get to a sustainable agency on a four-day week. Then he does the math on the week they already have.
If you cut out all of the guff, maybe all of the distractions… if you think about an average week, all of the time you maybe went, what do I do next, all of the time you got distracted, all of the time you procrastinated, if you added that up, that’s probably a day. So you are already working a four-day week. It’s just that you’re not actually feeling like it.
Removing distractions is where he starts (phones face down before this recording, and Daniel Kahneman’s “what you see is all there is” applied to notifications). The priority also makes hard calls for you. Ben’s example: it may tell you to fire a problem client, and since a problem client eats the time of two good ones, you can usually replace them with two.
When you have a priority, when everything services that priority, and when you know that every minute of your day is actually contributing to that priority, it means that you can finish up a Friday and be satisfied with what you got done in that week. Because you know those weeks where you feel like, God, I don’t even know what I got done? That’s because you’re pulled pillar to post and you’re all over the place… That is going to make it a hundred times easier to then switch off.
Ben’s reason for the whole system is in his company name, and in his last word on productivity: “we can talk about productivity until the cows come home, but why bother if it doesn’t enable you to enjoy life.” He ended the episode with a handbell he’d just bought to celebrate wins.